Memorial Drive

A Daughter's Memoir

De: Natasha Trethewey

Narrado por: Natasha Trethewey

An Instant New York Times Bestseller

A New York Times Notable Book

One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020

Named One of the Best Books of the Year by: The Washington Post, NPR, Shelf Awareness, Esquire, Electric Literature, Slate, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and InStyle

A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy

At age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma and now explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became.

With penetrating insight and a searing voice that moves from the wrenching to the elegiac, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Natasha Trethewey explores this profound experience of pain, loss, and grief as an entry point into understanding the tragic course of her mother’s life and the way her own life has been shaped by a legacy of fierce love and resilience. Moving through her mother’s history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a “child of miscegenation” in Mississippi, Trethewey plumbs her sense of dislocation and displacement in the lead-up to the harrowing crime that took place on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985.

Memorial Drive is a compelling and searching look at a shared human experience of sudden loss and absence but also a piercing glimpse at the enduring ripple effects of white racism and domestic abuse. Animated by unforgettable prose and inflected by a poet’s attention to language, this is a luminous, urgent, and visceral memoir from one of our most important contemporary writers and thinkers.

A Mother and Daughter History

Poignant and truthful, this book relates honest experiences of mother/daughter relationships. Each attempts to protect the other by sharing some life events while remaining silent about others. The memories are the only tangible items that remain.

Stunning vulnerability...

What a precious gift for the reader to have had this story shared with us. A tribute that will permanently leave its mark on you.

A daughter’s love letter

This is the most beautiful memoir I have ever read. It probably took a poet to journey back through childhood memories and form a stunning monument to her brave, intelligent and loving mother. It’s the love and pain conveyed by the author that makes profound the true and deep tragedy of violence against women.

Compelling.

This story takes us into the heart of a child and then a woman who comes to grips with what happened to her mother.

True story, deep grief

This was a story of how the author lost her mother in a way too horrific for her to deal with for many years. Told plainly but delicately in a way that brings the reader close to the author’s memories and experience of grief