This memoir ticked quite a few boxes for me in terms of my reading goals. Memorial Drive was a nominee for the Goodreads Choice Award for memoir & Autobiography which is why I chose to read it. I became quite obsessed with reading memoirs last year, so this was a continuation of that.
For 2021, I am keen to increase my empathy for those whose life experience is very different from mine. I also wanted to read a Pulitzer Prize winner. Whilst this book didn't win a Pulitzer Prize, Natasha Trethewey did win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2007.
It's a slim volume at 212 pages but it is by no means an easy read or a book you want to read too quickly. It needs to be digested slowly.
This is an exploration of delayed grief. A picking away at a wound, buried for many years. The author observes:
"The whole time I have been working to tell this story, I have done so incrementally, parsing it so that I could bear it: neat, compartmentalized segments that have allowed me to carry on these three decades without falling apart."
Structure
The book is broken into two parts.
The first part is about the author's childhood. The second part is the author's attempt at experiential research; an attempt to reconstruct her mother's life in the final days before her second, estranged husband kills her.
Trethewey breaks up the writing from time to time with bracketed reflections. Wikipedia tells us that square brackets or crotchets are used to insert explanatory material. There are five of these bracketed reflections. They are reflections on the creative process and the subconsious experience of grief. The first reflection is an account of the author's dream three weeks after her mother dies. The second reflection is about the dreams that began once the author announced the intention to write about the experience of her mother's death. The final three reflections are about the writing process.
Time and Place
Trethewey was born in 1966 in Gulfport Mississippi. On her birth certificate her mother is described as coloured and her father Canadian. In fact her parents had to marry in Cincinatti, Ohio as it was illegal for them to marry in the south. Her mother gave birth in the coloured ward of the hospital. In 1966. I am dumbstruck that segregation was still operating this late in the day.
Trethewey's birthday was the 100th Anniversary of the Confederate Memorial Day. That fact and having two well-educated parents who imparted a great love of writing and literature gives Trethewey a unique perspective and ability to articulate the complexity of her heritage and the challenge of straddling both worlds.
I've included a map below for those not familiar with the locations described in the book. You can zoom in and out for context.
Themes and Issues
There are so many themes and issues in this little memoir, its difficult to know where to begin. There is the issue of racial segregation, black and white, north and south, divorce, separation, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction, mother-daughter relationships, blended families, domestic violence, trauma.
Recommend?
As a family historian and lover of literature I found this both a visceral and deeply intellectual approach to a memoir.
The author states:
"To survive trauma, one must be able to tell a story about it."
Her account of being "sideswiped" by grief in reading real records resonated strongly with me.
As did the crazy happenstance or synchronicity, often in timing, of people connecting you with materials vital to your research.
As the daughter of a writer and a scholar, Trethewey is familiar with the device of metaphor to help us tell stories. She trawls through her past examining the stories, including dreams, she has told herself, looking for reinterpretation and new meaning.
She has suffered survivor's guilt and the challenge of acknowledging and/or coming to grips with how much our parents, and particularly our mothers, sacrifice in order to ensure not only our survival but our growth.
Her testament to her mother's life, and the cruel robbing thereof, is powerful reading indeed and gives much food for thought.
