Memorial Drive audiobook

Some thirty years after her mother’s death at the hands of her brutal stepfather, Natasha Trethewey is documenting the long, arduous and painful process of reclaiming her memories of her life with her mother, memories she purposely had left dormant for years as a form of self protection, it seems. Here she presents her life with her mother in a style to be expected from such a skilled poet.This is not the usual memoir as such or the story of her mother; rather it is an exegesis of their relationship, her mother’s marriages, the results of her murder and the tale of the formation of a writer from childhood. That childhood began in Mississippi at a time when her parents’ marriage was literally a crime, her father being a white Canadian and her mother a black woman. But it was apparently not a crime within her family of extended relatives on her mother’s side. Over the years, without Natasha’s understanding, her parents became estranged, separated and divorced. But both were supportive parents in her memory. Then mother and daughter moved to Atlanta setting the stage for triumphs and tragedy and a course of events that took the author time and distance to unravel, to find her place, to find her mother.One of the interesting facets of this book for me is Trethewey’s use of literary terms or features to discuss aspects of her life. Those most used are metaphor and imagery. These often intersect with dreams and emotions of all kinds. I definitely recommend this memoir.A copy of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review.

In her riveting memoir, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey examines the interplay of grief and memory as she attempted to come to terms with her mother’s brutal murder thirty years ago. Natasha was born in Mississippi in 1966 to an African-American mother and a white Canadian father when miscegenation was still illegal. Although she spent her early years in the warmth of her mother’s loving extended family, both Natasha and her parents were constantly subjected to the Gulfport white community's disdain and racism.Natasha’s parents divorced when she was six. She moved with her mother to Atlanta, where her Mother worked and studied to become a social worker. She also met and married Joel, an African- American Vietnam veteran. Joel became physically abusive, and the abuse gradually spiraled out of control.In her memoir, Natasha shares her recollections of Joel’s toxic behavior and her mother’s attempts to get help, leave and divorce Joel, followed by his relentless stalking. Natasha is 19, and her mother is 40 when Joel shoots her in her apartment's parking lot. Twenty years later, Natasha obtains the police files on the case. She includes the transcriptions of her stepfather’s final threatening phone calls to her mother in the memoir. These revelations cause her to relive and reexamine the trauma anew.Memorial Drive is beautifully written. I listened to the author read the book on audio. It was a moving experience.

As she says in this, her memorial to her mother, Natasha Trethwey observes "Three decades is a long time to get to know the contours of loss." Her mother, murdered by an abusive stepfather in 1985, had accomplished much in her 40 years, but was unable to unburden herself of a second marriage that never should have been. Augmented with transcripts and pages of evidence, Trethwey attempts to face her grief at this loss she sustained at the age of 19. Now, older than her mother ever was able to be, she addresses it, even more effectively due to her power as a poet. In addition to the tragedy of losing her life at a particularly young age, Gwen was denied the pride of enjoying the brilliant success of her award winning, Poet Laureate daughter.Today I was privileged to see her in a Zoom interview courtesy of Politics and Prose. It was highly emotional for her, and made me appreciate her accomplishment even more.

This book is incredible. An incredibly well crafted memoir. A story that is devastating. The writer is superb. There were parts that took my breath away. Wrecked me. This is a must read story of the layers of trauma of domestic violence on family and survival. Wow.

“What matters is the transformative power of metaphor and the stories we tell ourselves about the arc and meaning of our lives.”Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Natasha Tretheway, former U.S Poet Laureate, is also well known for the fact that her mother was killed by her second husband when Tretheway was nineteen years old. I have read a lot of her poetry, though no whole collection, but am correcting that error now. Monument is one book dedicated to her mother, but that terrible event weaves its way through a lot of her work, I am aware. Of the time she was notified of the murder, "that was the moment when I both felt that I would become a poet and then immediately afterward felt that I would not. I turned to poetry to make sense of what had happened.”Born on Confederate Memorial Day to a black mother and white father (poet Eric Tretheway), which was illegal in Mississippi at the time Tretheway’’s work has always been based on her life growing up biracial in Mississippi and her research on and experience of racism, especially in the American South where she grew up. Though I knew what this story was about long before I read it, I was reluctant to read it, knowing it would have brutal elements of domestic abuse and violence in it, but I finally decided to read it anyway because I knew her poetry, and ultimately, I knew it would be elegant and thoughtful in plumbing her pain for herself and others, and it surely was. It’s not till decades after the murder that Tretheway got her hands on the case files and this opened up every wound she ever had about the event, I am certain. She shares with us her mother’s journal entries detailing abuse, and one last agonizing phone call transcript of a conversation between her mother and her second husband.Maybe ultimately it's a mother-daughter story, an anguished love story. I heard the author read it, as she also tells us that this book took a long time for her to write, accomplished in painful chunks, as long as she could endure it, but of it, finally, she says: “In the narrative of my life, which is the look backward rather than forward into the unknown and unstoried future, I emerged from the pool as from a baptismal font—changed, reborn—as if I had been shown what would be my calling even then. This is how the past fits into the narrative of our lives, gives meaning and purpose. Even my mother’s death is redeemed in the story of my calling, made meaningful rather than merely senseless. It is the story I tell myself to survive.”An article on Tretheway:https://magazine.northwestern.edu/fea...

Nie wyobrażam sobie, jak bolesne musiało być dla autorki pisanie tej książki.