Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

"How could anyone fail to save a person of such substance?"

"Nothing she has written drills down into her past, and her family's, as powerfully as Memorial Drive."

"Exploring personal trauma, memory, and closure, Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winner Trethewey returns to the site of her mother's murder ..."

"Using descriptions of photographs, dreamscapes, memories of historical events (such as Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon in 1974) and even transcripts of the final phone calls between Turnbough and Grimmette, Trethewey builds a narrative that asks: How does one get intimately close to violence and still survive?"

"In one of the book's most devastating and artful chapters, Trethewey makes an unexpected but wholly necessary switch to the second person ..."

"Trethewey observes astutely the ways in which racial prejudices are passed down and repeated ..."

"Trethewey declines to offer a neat conclusion, but she succeeds in making meaning from pain."

"This profound story of the horrors of domestic abuse and a daughter's eternal love for her mother will linger long after the book's last page is turned."

"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."

"Poet Laureate Trethewey, winner of a Pulitzer Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and many other awards, begins her graceful, moving memoir with her mother's murder in 1985 ..."