Memorial Drive. Natasha Tretheway. 2020. Bloomsbury Publishing. 229 pages. [Source: public library.]
Mother-daughter relationships are so often fraught. Mothers are often entrusted with raising healthy, whole adults and it seems daughters will find themselves raging against the strain of expectation and vicarious dreams. If they’re lucky, time will give them opportunity to reconcile the tension and benefit from an understanding of each other that comes with age. Unfortunately, that’s not the story of Memorial Drive, Natasha Trethewey’s memoir.
Instead, Memorial Drive starts off with the hard truth that Natasha and her mother Gwendolyn did not have the benefit of time bringing them closer with a renewed relationship. It starts where it ends, with Gwendolyn’s murder at the hands of her ex-husband when Natasha was a 19-year-old freshman in college.
The rest of the book follows as Trethewey, more than 30 years on, reflects on her childhood and adolescence, framed largely around the relationship between her and her mother. She recounts her earliest years with her black American mother and white Canadian father in the relative cocoon of familiarity in Mississippi. Later, when her parents separate, she ends up in Georgia, where the majority of her trauma unfolds during a period of time that she relegates to “willed forgetting.” It ends with a painstaking retelling of the events that preceded her mother’s shooting.
Trethewey’s use of a non-chronological approach is incredibly effective in building a sense of suspense about how such tragic events could come to pass. The recounting of events doesn’t just examine her relationship with her own parents, but also that of her mother with her parents. This style, however, is further indication of the author’s experience in reliving everything:
The whole time I have been working to tell this story, I have done so incrementally; parsing it so that I could bear it: neat, compartmentalized segments that have allowed me to carry on these three decades without falling apart.
The primary sources in this book are the hardest to read. There’s the 12-page handwritten chronology of Gwendolyn’s attempt to escape her marriage. Then there are the recordings of the chilling conversations she had with her estranged husband. Without overtly saying so, Trethewey also paints a picture of the obstacles many women trying to leave abusive relationships, whether they are successful or not in doing so.
This book was an emotional read on its own, but it is particularly evocative as an audiobook. Trethewey narrates Memorial Drive, and this fact makes certain passages even more emotionally poignant. As a reader, the book feels cathartic, as if Tretheway was able to exorcise some of the trauma she experienced and the grief she contends with.
Despite being an emotional read, it’s not all negative. The author’s reflections on her childhood in Mississippi and the rare moments of joy with her mother are comforting. And above everything, Trethewey’s writing is captivating. So despite the darker tone of the memoir, it is a book that is readily absorbed. For that, it has my full recommendation.
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