Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey

 "Of course, we're made up of what we've forgotten too, what we've tried to bury or suppress. 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."                                  -from the memoir

I was invited to participate in an intergenerational book study of Memorial Drive. A couple of other seniors and I would be reading and discussing the book along with students in the UCF Honors College. The book was chosen by their professor and it was an excellent choice because of the multi-age perspective of the author in her memoir.

Natasha Trethewey identifies as "a child of miscegenation" (a new word for me); her mother was black and her father, white. Her first years were spent in Mississippi where mixed-race marriage was not universally accepted. The family lived near maternal relatives. I especially liked Tasha's grandmother and Aunt Sugar, a feisty lady. When her parents divorced, 6-year-old Tasha and her mother relocated to Atlanta and within the year her mother, Gwen, met a man she would soon marry. Tasha calls him "Big Joe" and doesn't like him from the start.

Early in the book, subtitled A Daughter's Memoir, we know that Tasha's mother was murdered but the who, how and why are revealed little by little and not until the final chapters do we learn details, making it something of a page-turner. The author lost her mother when she was only 19 and spent some 30 years subduing the memory before she decided to return to Memorial Drive in Atlanta, where the tragedy occurred. There she confronted her memories and sought ways of reconnecting with her mother's life while filling in gaps in her own.

Ms. Trethewey has a very lyrical style of writing and uses imagery and figurative language to great affect. It is not surprising to note she is a poet and, in fact, won a Pulitzer for Poetry in 2007 and was the US Poet Laureate from 2012-2013. The order of her story is not chronological, moving back and forth in time, a bit confusing for the reader. It is interesting to note that Natasha's father was a writer and exposed her to the classics and mythology at a very young age and even predicted she "would have to become a writer, that because of the nature of [my] experience I would have something necessary to say."

Although I wished the book had included photographs, the author's descriptions are vivid. On the book jacket, there is a lovely picture of Natasha as a baby with her mother. 

This memoir was poignant, not really entertaining, but thought-provoking and powerfully written. I will rate it a 4.