A piercingly beautiful memoir about race, loss and family by the Pulitzer Prize winner and twice-appointed US poet laureate: the story of black women and violence in the American South as you've never read it before
Natasha Trethewey is a former US poet laureate and the author of five collections of poetry as well as a book of creative non-fiction. 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. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She lives in Illinois. @NTrethewey
Natasha Trethewey has crafted an indelible memorial to her mother
with Memorial Drive, sentence by crystalline sentence ... A journey
through searing personal grief, its scope is broadened by sharp
insights into domestic abuse and racism, and through a keen
exploration of the transformative power of storytelling ... This is
spare, spellbinding storytelling, and even though institutional
indifference helps make its tragic denouement inevitable, it’s as
gripping as any thriller
*Mail on Sunday*
Stirring ... Trethewey was just nineteen years old when her former
stepfather killed her mother in a fit of horrific rage. In Memorial
Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, Trethewey steps back from this moment
to unveil all that came before it, combing through her mother’s
history in lush and vivid prose
*Time, 100 Must Read Books of 2020*
At the center of Trethewey’s memoir is the wrenching story of her
mother’s murder, by her ex-husband, in 1985. But this haunting
elegy by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet is also a work of great
beauty and tenderness, an atmospheric evocation of innocence and
loss
*New York Times, 100 Notable Books of 2020*
One of the most beautiful memoirs I have ever read ... A
masterpiece ... A writer whom I admire with all my being
*Elizabeth Gilbert*
I’ve not read an American memoir where more happens in the
assemblage of language ... Memorial Drive forces the reader to
think about how the sublime Southern conjurers of words, spaces,
sounds and patterns protect themselves from trauma when trauma may
be, in part, what nudged them down the dusty road to poetic mastery
...The more virtuosic our ability to use language to probe, the
harder it becomes to protect ourselves from the secrets buried in
our - and our nation’s - marrow. This is the conundrum and the
blessing of the poet. This is the conundrum and blessing of
Memorial Drive
*New York Times*
There are moments when you pull yourself away from this work simply
to admire its sheer artistry ... Trethewey’s masterpiece suggests
that the greatest act of defiance a black person can do is to
remember
*Financial Times*
Emotionally charged and exquisitely written, Memorial Drive is an
unforgettable tribute to Trethewey’s mother, and a poignant
portrait of her self-realisation as a writer
*Tatler*
Beautifully poetic but heartbreakingly sad … An intense,
gut-wrenching act of remembrance
*Sunday Express*
Powerful
*The Times*
Powerful ... It's such a beautiful book to read, I can't tell you
... The timing of this book gives it a very powerful resonance
*Front Row, BBC Radio 4*
Natasha Trethewey has composed a riveting memoir that reads like a
detective story about her mother’s murder by a malevolent
ex-husband. It reads with all the poise and clarity of Trethewey’s
unforgettable poetry - heartrending without a trace of pathos, wise
and smart at once, unforgettable. The short section her mother
penned as she was trying to escape the marriage moved me to tears.
I read the book in one gulp and expect to reread it more than once.
A must-read classic
*Mary Karr*
She brings tenderness, compassion, and forensic attention to
language
*BBC*
A searing, moving memoir
*Net-A-Porter, 12 Moving memoirs you should add to your reading
list*
Natasha Trethewey’s memoir is predicated on a brutal act, but there
is nothing sensational about the way it reads. This
memoir-cum-true-crime story from the two-time Poet Laureate and
Pulitzer winner is a narrative about how her mother was murdered by
her ex-stepfather, but it is also a coming-of-age story for a young
artist ... This book may have been written by one of our most
celebrated poets, but its lyricism is tethered to the author’s
lived and deeply felt experience.
*Vogue, The 22 Best Books to Read in Summer 2020*
In Memorial Drive, Natasha Trethewey has transformed unimaginable
tragedy into a work of sublimity. There’s sorrow and heartbreak,
yes, but also a beautiful portrait of a mother and her daughter’s
enduring love. Trethewey writes elegantly, trenchantly, intimately
as well about the fraught history of the south and what it means
live at the intersection of America’s struggle between blackness
and whiteness. And what, in our troubled republic, is a subject
more evergreen?
*Mitchell S. Jackson*
Haunting, powerful, and painfully stunning, Memorial Drive is one
of the best memoirs I've read in a long time. A brilliant
storyteller, Trethewey writes the unimaginable truth with a
clear-eyed courage that proves, once again, that she's one of the
nation's best writers
*Ada Limón, author of Bright Dead Things and NBCC award-winner The
Carrying*
A story that burrows deep in your emotional centre ...The work
enraptures like a thriller, unraveling as it races against the
inevitable
*Esquire*
A moving, poignant reflection on grief
*Buzzfeed*
A tragic tale, told with clarity and shattering insight
*BBC*
Natasha Trethewey’s forthcoming memoir Memorial Drive just bowled
me over. Is it the best true crime memoir I’ve read? It’s certainly
in my upper echelon now
*Sarah Weinman*
Her exquisite and brutal lyricism as well as her commitment to
truth makes Trethewey one of the most important American poets of
our time ... A tremendously empathic and enthusiastic force in our
nation’s bleak period. Her words settle with profound gravity
*Paris Review*
A glorious example of what results when one listens – and writes –
brilliantly … Her work is loved because she refuses to forget those
who’ve been lost and the struggles of those who remain
*Washington Post*
Trethewey has an insistent intellect and a gift for turning over
rich soil
*New York Times*
Impassioned but clear-eyed … She is poised to build a powerful
legacy … We can look forward to the fresh direction that
Trethewey’s compass will, inevitably, point us
*New Yorker*
What a devastating story she has to tell; if it is at all like her
Pulitzer Prize-winning poems, it will lift and mourn and make you
think at the same time
*Literary Hub*
She reveals how keenly all of us are shaped by loss, and how much
America, too, has been forged by the ever-present shard of
grief
*O Magazine*
This is a black woman who has committed an entire life and career
to holding a country accountable, despite the weight of her own
grief
*Buzzfeed*
The wide scope of her interests and her adept handling of form have
created an opus of classics both elegant and necessary
*Marilyn Nelson, 2016 Academy of American Poets Fellowship
judge*
A marker in America’s conversation on race and gender … A must-read
for people interested in where America has been, where it’s headed,
and how to traverse the crossroads of the country’s literature
while also perhaps saving their soul at the beginning of this
turbulent century
*Tyehimba Jess, Poetry Foundation*
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