Reviews for Memorial drive A daughter's memoir. [electronic resource] :

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Reprising years that she tried to forget, a daughter unearths pain and trauma. Former U.S. 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. Her mother was 41; Trethewey, 19. In an effort to discover “the hidden, covered over, nearly erased,” the author returned to the scene of the crime and her own buried memories. “I need now,” she writes, “to make sense of our history, to understand the tragic course upon which my mother’s life was set and the way my own life has been shaped by that legacy.” Trethewey spent her early childhood in Mississippi, where she felt “protected, insulated from racial intimidation and violence.” Her black mother, Gwendolyn Turnbough, was a Head Start administrator; her white father was rarely home, either working or pursuing a graduate degree in New Orleans. By the time 6-year-old Trethewey and her mother moved to Atlanta, the couple had divorced. The move, writes the author, “ended the world of my happy early childhood,” and soon her comforting sense of “the two-ness” between mother and daughter was broken when Turnbough’s new boyfriend, Joel, moved in. When her mother was at work, he found ways to torment Trethewey. “Always,” she reveals, “there was some small thing he’d accuse me of, some transgression he invented in order to punish me.” He beat her mother, and Trethewey could hear her pleading at night; her face would be swollen and bruised in the morning. Trethewey was in high school when her mother finally divorced Joel, and at last “everything felt normal.” But in February 1984, he tried to kill Turnbough. He was arrested and imprisoned, but after his release, he threatened her again, and this time succeeded. Delicate prose distinguishes a narrative of tragedy and grief. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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