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Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

by Natasha Trethewey

Ecco ·2020 ·213 pages ·Memoir
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Top of the Pile
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92/99
Top of the Pile

96/99

Critics

Top of the Pile

87/99

Readers

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Scholars

92/99

Rating

99/99

Volume

81/99

Rating

93/99

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About This Book

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. 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.


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Reviews

"Thanks to a police officer who had been the first on the scene, Trethewey has access to...her mother's police statements...transcripts of telephone calls ..."

Dwight Garner· The New York Times Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"You cannot ethically represent another person's experience of trauma, Memorial Drive tells us here; you can only ethically represent the experience of your own trauma."

Hope Wabuke· NPR Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"I've not read an American memoir where more happens in the assemblage of language than Memorial Drive ..."

Kiese Makeba Laymon· The New York Times Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"the book swarms with fantasy ..."

Katy Waldman· The New Yorker Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"The book eschews the common memoiristic route of picking apart the aftermath of trauma ..."

Hillary Kelly· Los Angeles Times Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Memorial Drive is Trethewey's gorgeous exploration of all the wounds that never heal: her mother's, her own, and the wounds of slavery and racism on the soul of a troubled nation."

Ann Levin· USA Today Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

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