Book Review: Memorial Drive

 

"I took with me what I had cultivated all those years: mute avoidance of my past, silence and willed amnesia buried deep in me like a root."

So begins Natasha Trethewey's memoir, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir. It is a gut punch of a book about her childhood and her mother and how her mother was murdered by an abusive ex-partner.

The book details her parent's illegal marriage and subsequent divorce; the mother daughter duo's move from Mississippi to Atlanta, Georgia, where Gwen, her mother, meets Joel aka Big Joe. Big Joe is a deeply troubled and troubling person, putting it extremely mildly. He torments Natasha, uses his son with Natasha's mother as a bargaining chip (which is classic abuser technique) to coerce her into doing what he wants, and begins beating her repeatedly.

The second half of the book details what happens once Gwen decides to leave. Reading about her escape is incredibly bittersweet because from the outset of the book, the reader knows that Gwen doesn't make it out alive. Included in the second half are several pages of text that she wrote out on legal pads while in the shelter and several pages of transcripts from taped phone calls, which are chilling to read.

Trethewey makes repeated mention throughout the slim volume about forgetting and remembering, how they are intertwined and how she wishes she could take back the purposeful forgetting she did immediately after her mother's murder, so she could remember more of her.

But even as much as the author buried, she notes:

"Some forgetting is necessary and the mind works to shield us from things that are too painful; even so, some aspect of trauma lives on in the body, from which it can reemerge unexpectedly. Even when I was trying to bury the past, there were moments from those lost years that kept coming back, rising to mind unbidden.'

The author ends the book asking, "...How could I have been that close and not destroyed by it? Why was I spared?-" She, at the end, is able to make some semblance of peace with her mother's murder and the man behind it. It is a deeply wrenching, thoughtful book and at it's core, a love letter to a mother that she tried in vain to protect, to a mother she was robbed of knowing and to a mother who fought to protect her children to the end of her life.

It is a book that is deeply, deeply felt and hard to read at parts, but very clearly written by both a poet and someone who loved someone very much.