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    Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir
    Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir
    Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir
    Audiobook5 hours

    Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

    Written by Natasha Trethewey

    Narrated by Natasha Trethewey

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    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.

    Editor's Note

    Gorgeously written and searing…

    Critics across the board have been raving about this memoir from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey. The author addresses essential topics — including domestic violence and racism — as she confronts her mother's horrifying murder at the hands of her stepfather. A gorgeously written and searing read.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJul 28, 2020
    ISBN9780063005860
    Author

    Natasha Trethewey

    Natasha Trethewey is a former US poet laureate and the author of five collections of poetry, as well as a book of creative nonfiction. She is currently the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. In 2007 she won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection Native Guard.

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    Reviews for Memorial Drive

    4.5/5

    472 ratings36 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Absolutely heartbreaking. Stunning. Chilling. Shocking and infuriating. A must read.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Couldn’t stop thinking about my relationship with my mom. Well written, tremendously touching and sad! Couldn’t imagine living with the person that would be responsible of her death.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This book was really well done as it was an easy read.
    • 3/5
      This the story of a daughter coming to erm with her mothers death 3 death. After holding on to her pain for 3 decades, she visit the place of her mothers death and revisit these tragic events. After doing so she understand her grief better. I would of love to learn what happened to her and her brother after her moms death. But all and all it was a sad tale but good story.
    • 5/5
      Well done but so sad. One who said they love you takes your life.
    • 5/5
      Heartbreaking.
      The audio narration by the author was excellent. Highly recommend.
    • 5/5
      This is one of the most beautifully written books I've ever read. Get ready for a visceral experience. Cannot recommend enough.
    • 5/5
      This was so heartbreaking but the telling of this story was phenomenal.
    • 5/5
      Beautifully written. A tragic story. One that should have never happened.
    • 5/5
      This book is heartfelt and rich with the emotions from the trauma. Moving
    • 5/5
      Good Read!!!!! So much attention paid to the emotion, this is a heartfelt book. I enjoyed it alot
    • 5/5
      This is such a beautiful, yet heartbreaking memoir about grief that absolutely highlights the authors poetic talent. I'm absolutely at a loss for words and all I can do is just simply recommend it for others to experience themselves.
    • 5/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of this book. Her style of writing is so poetically descriptive and profound.
    • 5/5
      Beautifully written. What a hard story but eloquently told. One of the best writers
    • 5/5
      This book was beautifully written it was tragic and in depth about domestic abuse. What happened to her mother was very sad.
    • 5/5
      Poetic, powerful poignant
      Deeply personal yet incredibly accessible.
      Author’s narration is heartbreaking
    • 5/5
      I have never read a book with such a vivid words. Because the author is a poet, she has the gift of using words that cause the reader to feel what she felt, see what she saw. Hearing the book read by the author also conveyed the authors emotions as she read her own words.
    • 5/5
      I couldn't stop listening. A great tribute to a mother who was taken to soon at the hands of another....
    • 5/5
      I recommend everyone read this story! The authors voice within her tragedy provides a perspective that is life changing.
    • 5/5
      Wonderfully written. What a sad story that unfortunately we are still living through today violence against women.
    • 5/5
      Wow! A beautifully written story about a very ugly thing that happened!!!! I will never forget this one! Never!
    • 5/5
      I listened to the audio version, read by the author - excellent but truly heartbreaking story of her mother - a victim of domestic abuse with the worst possible outcome. I had previously read a poetry book by the author and had added this to my reading list.
    • 5/5
      Trethewey opens a window onto her soul and her mother’s soul. Written with the insights and clarity of a poet it is not a long book but a very full book. There are unanswered questions, questions about her father and about her book by I understand this as really being about loss coping with loss and reaching for understanding.
    • 4/5
      The grief, the pain, all described in such beautiful prose. It is a heartbreaking read, but so worth it.
    • 3/5
      Just under 40% of women who are murdered die at the hands of their domestic partner. According to the UN, as of 2013 this accounts for the deaths of more than 30,000 women a year. This is horrific and unfathomable. Former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey's mother Gwen was one of these women. And Memorial Drive is the reflective memoir she's written to grapple with the loss of her mother at the hands of her former step-father.Trethewey was born to a beautiful, young black mother and a white Canadian father in the strictly segregated Deep South. Her early years with her parents, living amongst the extended maternal side of her family was happy and her memoir is filled with joy as she describes those early years. But her parents drifted apart after her father went back to school and they ultimately divorced. She and her mother moved to Atlanta where her mother got a job as a social worker and eventually met Big Joe, the man who will be Tasha's stepfather and who will murder her mother. Trethewey recounts the physical abuse her mother endures and the emotional abuse she herself faces whenever Big Joe is around. She also tells, fairly dispassionately, of the ways in which the system fails her mother over and over again. A teacher doesn't report the abuse Trethewey tells her about. A person at the women's shelter brushes it off as normal when Natasha calls to say that her mother got into her car with Big Joe and something is wrong. The policeman assigned to watch her mother's apartment all night the night she was murdered left his post.Trethewey's recounting of life with her mother and stepfather is patchy and she ruminates on the nature of memory. She talks of intentionally forgetting those years and the constant fluctuating levels of terror but if her head doesn't remember, she still carries the trauma and misplaced guilt over her mother's death deep in her bones. Her telling is dreamy, philosophical, and poetic but it is strangely emotionally removed, flatter than it should be, almost as if despite wanting to open up in this memoir, she is still protecting herself from the full brunt of emotion. And while she discusses the fact of her erasing what she could of those years, the lack of her half brother's presence (and also to some extent that of her biological father) is a strange omission. She was 19 when her mother was murdered by Big Joe and she is reckoning with her memories 30 years after the fact but it all felt unsatisfyingly incomplete. Almost at the end of the memoir, there is a transcript of several phone calls between her mother and Big Joe after he's gotten out of prison for assaulting Gwen in which he threatens her and she tries to reason with him. The transcripts are quite long given the overall length of the book and while they are horrific, they don't really add anything that Trethewey hasn't already shown the reader about this murderous, delusional man. It feels somehow wrong to criticize this book in any way given the terrible thing that Trethewey is sharing but in the end, I just didn't connect with the way it was written and I wanted to know more than I was given (and that I certainly wasn't owed). Others have raved about this though so perhaps take my opinion with a grain of salt.
    • 4/5
      The mother of poet, Natasha Trethewey was murdered in the parking lot of her apartment on Memorial Dr. in Atlanta in 1985 and this beautifully written book is the poet's attempt to come to terms with not only her murder, but also the life with an abusive husband that led to her killing. It is also a poignant story of the love between a mother and a daughter, and the many, many legal inequities that keep women from being protected from violent men. That Trethewey has emerged from the horror of her early life is a testament to both her strength and her creative powers.
    • 2/5
      I feel bad for Natasha Trethewey and her family for the terrible murder that stole away her mother much too early in her life, but I never fully connected with this book. I knew I was in trouble when the first sentence kicked off a dream sequence. It's one of several throughout the book, and I just could not overcome my knee-jerk negative reaction against that literary device, my biggest pet peeve as a reader.The book is about half the author describing the circumstances of her mother's murder (including extended transcripts of phone conversations between the mother and the murderer) and half processing her emotions regarding that loss (including an extended sequence of a visit to a psychic). Either the balance was off or the book was too short, because I found myself wanting to know more about her mother and how the events effected her mother's other child, Joey Grimmette. It seems weird that he disappears from the book when the murder occurs. I know the book is about the author's journey, but this omission points to the focus as perhaps being too narrow.I don't regret reading the book, but I don't think I'd recommend it to others.
    • 4/5
      Poet Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive is a brief, evocative book about a murder—her mother’s, at the hands of her deranged stepfather. The narrative starts off slow, but as it progresses, it moves with the inexorable pace of a Greek tragedy. Hard to take, but rewarding.
    • 4/5
      I heard this author speak and she simmers with sadness and raw emotion. She's a very creative person and I am so sorry for her loss, even all these years later.I listened to this book and think I would have preferred to read it. A few parts on the audio dragged for me.
    • 4/5
      A beautifully written memoir of a daughter losing her mother to spousal abuse. Yet it is so much more than that. It is the story of someone reclaiming their life after tragedy. One of the best opening lines ever summarizes the author's experience. "The past beats inside me like a second heart." So true, for each of us!