Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

When Natasha Trethewey's mother was shot and killed by her ex-stepfather when she was nineteen, her entire life fell apart. She faced the twin forces of life and death in the wake of unfathomable trauma, grieving and yet a young adult. She now examines how this event influenced her for the rest of her life and how it affected her as an artist.

Natasha Trethewey, a poet who won the Pulitzer Prize, examines this intense experience of suffering, loss, and grief as a starting place for comprehending the sad trajectory of her mother's life and the ways in which her own life has been influenced by a heritage of great love and resiliency. In the years leading up to the horrific tragedy that occurred on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985, Trethewey explores her feelings of displacement and dislocation by going back to her mother's past in the severely segregated South and her own childhood as a "child of miscegenation" in Mississippi.