How a brilliant poet laureate finally faced up to her mother’s MURDER
Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir
Natasha Trethewey
Bloomsbury £16.99
In 1985, when Natasha Trethewey was 19, her former stepfather shot and killed her mother at point-blank range at their home in Atlanta. Afterwards, Trethewey locked the door on her past, going on to become a two-time poet laureate of the United States. But even as she thought she was fleeing the trauma, she was in fact working her way steadily back to it. Decades later, returning to Atlanta for a university teaching post, she’s compelled to confront her willed amnesia.
This powerful memoir is the result. A journey through searing personal grief, its scope is broadened by sharp insights into domestic abuse and racism, and through a keen exploration of the transformative power of storytelling.
Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough was raised in America’s segregated South by a fierce, smart single mother who refused to be cowed when Klan members burned a cross in her driveway. She was ringed by extended family, and when she married Eric Trethewey, a fellow student who just happened to be white (interracial marriage was illegal in Mississippi until 1967), those same aunts and uncles doted equally on light-skinned Trethewey, the baby that followed.
After Gwen’s marriage broke down, she moved with her daughter to Atlanta. Trethewey was seven when Joel Grimmette, a controlling, violent Vietnam veteran entered their life. He soon began tormenting her. He’d invade her private space, breaking the lock on her diary and leaving her hairbrush flecked with his dandruff. Left alone with him, he’d sadistically tell her he was going to have her committed, forcing her to pack a bag and driving her in long loops round the bypass that rings Atlanta before finally taking her home.
Trethewey remains mystified by her failure to tell her mother. Was it just that she liked to think of herself as a ‘good girl’, and didn’t want to spoil her mother’s apparent newfound happiness? It’s one of several sources of gnawing guilt, too: if she hadn’t stayed silent, perhaps her mother would have left the marriage soon enough to save herself. But later, when Trethewey hears Joel beating Gwen and tells a beloved teacher, she’s fobbed off. It’s the first of many occasions when figures of authority let Trethewey and her mother down, culminating in the cop whose job it was to watch Gwen’s apartment after Joel was freed from jail following his first attempt at murdering her. On the morning he succeeded, the cop had knocked off early.
While Memorial Drive is not a long book, Trethewey finds space to weave in dreams, myths and talismanic images along with police transcripts, spinning an account that is as full of omens as a Greek tragedy, and setting it to a soundtrack of her mother’s favourite albums by The Temptations, Al Green, Jimi Hendrix. This is spare, spellbinding storytelling, and even though institutional indifference helps make its tragic denouement inevitable, it’s as gripping as any thriller.
‘To survive trauma, one must be able to tell a story about it,’ Trethewey writes.
In the process of not only surviving but also thriving, she’s crafted an indelible memorial to her mother, sentence by crystalline sentence.