03 Nov / Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey [in Booklist]
*STARRED REVIEW
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey makes both her prose and narrating debut with a startling memoir that alchemizes neverending trauma into an exquisite memorial. On June 5, 1985, Trethewey’s mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, was murdered by former stepfather Joel Grimmett on Atlanta’s Memorial Drive. Turnbough was 40, Trethewey 19; 35 years later, Trethewey gifts readers – in both print and her own voice – with something impossibly gorgeous, miraculously created from horrific tragedy.
Until she was 6, Trethewey’s 1960s Mississippi childhood was nurtured by her Black mother and her extended family, even as her Canadian white father was often absent. Her parents’ divorce moved mother and daughter to Atlanta, where Turnbough married Grimmett, who tormented Tretheway and brutalized Turnbough. Divorce, imprisonment, the courts, police – nothing could save Turnbough. Trethewey turns to memories, dreams, even a psychic, to try to understand her loss.
In 2005, Trethewey meets the first police officer who arrived at the murder scene; he bestows her with Turnbough’s case files, saved from a planned courthouse purge. Where Trethewey cannot find her own words to fill the void, she transcribes the evidence tapes, her mother desperate to mitigate Grimmett’s violence. With aching precision, Trethewey reads as if relentlessly bearing witness, reliving the abuse she survived, the terror her mother endured, the murder neither could escape, and the legacy of being left behind.
Review: “Media,” Booklist, October 15, 2020
Readers: Adult
Published: 2020