Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir by Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey’s critically acclaimed memoir, Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, is a profoundly intimate exploration of grief and reconciliation. Through the lens of structural racism, Trethewey masterfully creates an aching journey of a daughter trying to untangle her connection to her mother and understand her death.

The memoir begins with a summer evening in Georgia on Memorial Drive, the street in which Trethewey and her mother had lived together in Atlanta. Trethewey recounts the evening’s events in vivid detail, allowing readers to feel the memories core to her later experiences. As the story of Trethewey’s life unfolds, however, readers will slowly become aware of an underlying web of personal trauma.

Trethewey’s father, a black serviceman and Vietnam veteran, had abandoned her and her mother when Trethewey was only six years old. To make matters worse, her mother was unable to adequately support the two of them financially, forcing their family to rely on the safety net of poverty. As the story moves forward, Trethewey takes readers through a multi-layered account of her limited opportunities for advancement in life due to the overwhelming obstacles she faced merely for the color of her skin.

Trethewey also relates the experiences of her grandparents, who were part of the Great Migration, leaving the North to establish a foothold in Georgia even though society still frowned upon their new home. More than this, however, Trethewey incorporates her mother’s experiences of interracial couples, gender, and class into her story. She speaks of her mother’s systemic oppression, which ultimately culminates in her death.

The memoir, therefore, is an unflinching exploration into the racism and poverty Trethewey experienced – coupled with an honest acknowledgment of her own privilege and her attempts at reconciliation. Trethewey feels that her mother fought against injustice and that she must follow in her footsteps – and finds solace in knowing that, while her mother will no longer be physically present, her memory and spirit live on.

Structurally, Trethewey combines her recollections of past and present moments, juxtaposing her present-day life of success and security with the memory of her and her mother’s struggle to survive. Through the use of flashbacks, prologues, and epilogues, she knits her trauma and her hope for the future into an emotionally charged narrative.

Ultimately, Memorial Drive is an unyielding account of poverty and racism, expressed through the prism of a grieving daughter for her mother. It is an intimate yet multifaceted exploration of identity and survival in a society where structural racism still dominates. Readers will gain an invaluable, often heartbreaking, insight into what it means to search for peace and reconciliation with the past.