Elegiac ‘Memorial Drive’ is a memoir that sears the soul

Natasha Trethewey’s story of her mother’s life and death earns ★★★★ review.

Natasha Trethewey was 19 when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother on Memorial Drive in Atlanta. After cleaning out the apartment, Trethewey left the city and vowed never to look back. Years later, when a job brought her back to the area, she decided to finally reckon with her past.

The result is “Memorial Drive” (Ecco, 214 pp., ★★★★), an exquisitely written, elegiac memoir that tells the story of Trethewey’s charismatic but doomed mother, born Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, and tries to account for her disastrous second marriage and violent death.

Trethewey, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former two-term U.S. poet laureate, has published five volumes of poetry and a work of prose. In this book, she combines the jewel-like concision of the former with the propulsive drive of narrative nonfiction.

At the heart of the book is a series of linked mysteries: Who exactly was her mother? What caused her first marriage to Trethewey’s father to fail? And what drew her to her second husband, a clearly damaged man who abused her for years before finally killing her in 1985?

The daughter of a Black woman and white man, Trethewey spent her early childhood among her mother’s extended family in Gulfport, Mississippi. The passages describing those years are among the most lyrical in the book.

There was her great-uncle Son, “tall and handsome with … perfect teeth,” who mowed his lawn in “lace-up shoes, finely ribbed undershirts, and creased trousers.” His wife, Lizzie, with her “pillows of flesh,” powdered bosom, and large Bible on a stand “beneath portraits of Jesus, Kennedy, and King.” And Aunt Sugar, who chewed tobacco and taught little Tasha how to trap crawfish in the ditch that ran alongside the family property.

But early on, the little girl noticed that white people reacted differently depending on which parent she was with. In 1966, her mother had to give birth to her in a segregated hospital ward. On that day, rebel flags lined the street for the 100th anniversary of Mississippi’s Confederate Memorial Day. “Only at home, the three of us together, did I feel profoundly theirs, and in that trinity of mother, father, and child I would shut my eyes and fall asleep on the high bed between them.”

The childhood idyll was not to last. After her parents divorced, the 6-yearold girl moved to Atlanta with her newly single mother. For a short time, it was bliss. Then Joel entered the picture, an underemployed Vietnam vet who constantly invoked his wartime service to justify his oddities.

From the day they met, Natasha sensed he was trouble and kept a wide berth. Meanwhile, she excelled at school, made the cheerleading squad and vowed to keep quiet about his troubling behavior. When, in the fifth grade, she worked up the nerve to tell a trusted teacher that she’d overheard her mother being beaten, the teacher did nothing.

The abuse continued until her mother finally moved out and filed for divorce. Her last address, where she was murdered, was Memorial Drive, not far from Stone Mountain, “the symbol of the Confederacy and a monument to white supremacy that joins in my psyche the geography and history … of my deepest wounds.”

For a long time, Trethewey writes, she tried to forget as much as she could of the roughly 12 years she lived in the malign orbit of her former stepfather. Later, she came to regret forgetting. “Too much can be lost. It’s been harder for me to call back my mother when I have needed to most.”

“Memorial Drive” is Trethewey’s gorgeous exploration of all the wounds that never heal.