Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

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

"Delicate prose distinguishes a narrative of tragedy and grief."

"Trethewey's masterpiece suggests that the greatest act of defiance a black person can do is to remember."

"[a] yrical, courageous, and resounding remembrance."

"she combines the jewel-like concision of [poetry] with the propulsive drive of narrative nonfiction ..."

"Memorial Drive is an enduring work, beautiful and horrific."

"Trethewey dispenses this material to powerful effect ..."

"In Memorial Drive, the musicality of language combines with imagistic intensity to create a world of heightened subjectivity in which the small moon that is the young Trethewey orbits the constant planet that is her mother and her entire world; thus her mother's death and its aftermath — the emptiness of her absence — rockets loud across the constellation of Trethewey's life ..."

"Much of the book's memorializing occurs at a remove."

"At the risk of coming across as a selfish reader, I hasten to add that she provides a model for living with woundedness, making something usable out of the myriad details, some beautiful, others anguished."