| |
1 |
Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir
Author:
Trethewey, Natasha
Biographee:
Trethewey, Natasha
|
| |
|
Class:
Biography
Age: Adult
Language: English
Demand: Moderate
|
LC: HV6248.T
Print Run: 150000
|
|
ISBN-13: 9780062248572
LCCN: 2020449062
Imprint: Ecco
|
|
Pub Date: 07/28/2020
Availability: Available
List: $29.99
|
| |
Hardcover
|
|
|
Physical Description:
|
211 pages ; 22 cm
H 8.25",
W 5.5",
D 0.81",
0.69 lbs.
|
|
LC Series:
|
|
|
Brodart Sources:
|
Brodart's Diverse Titles: Black & African American (Adult)
Brodart's Diverse Titles: Multicultural (Adult)
Brodart's TOP Adult Titles
|
|
Bibliographies:
|
Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction Finalists
BCALA Literary Award Honorees
Booklist High-Demand Hot List
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Finalists
New York Times Bestsellers List
New York Times Bestsellers: Adult Nonfiction
Publishers Weekly Bestsellers
Texas Topaz Reading List: Nonfiction Gems for All Ages
|
|
Awards:
|
Adult Notable Books, ALA
BookPage Best Books
BookPage Starred Reviews
Booklist Editors Choice
Booklist Starred Reviews
Library Journal Best Books
Library Journal Starred Reviews
|
|
Starred Reviews:
|
Booklist
Library Journal
|
|
TIPS Subjects:
|
Crime/Law Enforcement
Family Life
African American & Black
Biography, Individual
|
|
BISAC Subjects: |
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / African American & Black
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary Figures
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women
DRAMA / Women Authors
HISTORY / Essays
HISTORY / Women
LAW / Criminal Law / General
POETRY / Women Authors
PSYCHOLOGY / Grief & Loss
TRUE CRIME / Murder / General
|
|
LC Subjects:
|
Autobiographies
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Cultural, Ethnic & Regional / African American & Black
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary Figures
Biographies
Family violence
Family violence, United States
Loss (Psychology)
Mothers and daughters
Mothers and daughters, United States, Biography
Mothers, Death
Multiracial people, United States, Biography
Poets, American, Biography
TRUE CRIME / Murder / General
Trethewey, Natasha D.,, 1966-
True crime stories
United States
Women poets, American
Women poets, American, Biography
|
|
SEARS Subjects: |
Crime
Homicide
|
|
Reading Programs: |
|
|
|
| |
| Annotations |
| Brodart's TOP Adult Titles | 04/01/2020 |
| Publisher Annotation: At age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma and now explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became. With penetrating insight and a searing voice that moves from the wrenching to the elegiac, Natasha Trethewey investigates this profound experience of pain, loss, and grief as an entry point into understanding the tragic course of her mother’s life and the way her own life has been shaped by a legacy of fierce love and resilience. Moving through her mother’s history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a “child of miscegenation” in Mississippi, Trethewey plumbs her sense of dislocation and displacement in the lead-up to the harrowing crime that took place on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985. 224pp., 150K |
|
| Starred Reviews: |
| Booklist | 06/15/2020 |
| As a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former U.S. poet laureate, Trethewey (Monument: Poems, New and Selected, 2018) has conducted profound excavations into African American history and her own life. In her memoir, a work of exquisitely distilled anguish and elegiac drama, she confronts the horror of her mother's murder. Trethewey's white Canadian father and her Black American mother met in college and eloped, their 1966 marriage deemed illegal in Mississippi. Trethewey recounts her sunny childhood within the embrace of her mother's accomplished and valiant extended family. Shadows grow after her parents divorced and Trethewey and her mother moved to Atlanta, where Gwendolyn earned a graduate degree in social work while supporting them as a waitress. Enter dangerously unbalanced Joel. Because Gwendolyn silently endured his violence, Trethewey concealed Joel's cruelty to her. When Gwendolyn finally broke free, she secured police protection, but it proved to be catastrophically inadequate. Through finely honed, evermore harrowing memories, dreams, visions, and musings, Trethewey maps the inexorable path to her mother's murder. She even shares transcripts of chilling phone conversations in which Gwendolyn, in spite of her terror, speaks to her killer in the carefully measured mode of a social worker. Trethewey writes, "To survive trauma, one must be able to tell a story about it." And tell her tragic story she does in this lyrical, courageous, and resounding remembrance. Donna Seaman. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2020. |
|
| Library Journal | 06/23/2020 |
| A former U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, Trethewey uses the corrosive grief stemming from her stepfather's murder of her mother to examine the challenges her mother faced in the segregated South and her own challenges as a "child of miscegenation" growing up in Mississippi. Barbara Hoffert. 224p. Library Journal Web Exclusive. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2020. |
|
| Journal Reviews |
| BookPage | 08/18/2020 |
| Fans of Natasha Trethewey's poetry might think they're already acquainted with the story of her mother's death in 1985 at the hands of the poet's stepfather. Most of Trethewey's poetry collections shrewdly explore Gwendolyn Turnbough's murder and Trethewey's continual grappling with that grief. However, Trethewey's seventh book and first memoir, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir, is a new examination of the 35-year-old crime. It moves beyond simply recounting this loss to study the ways a mother's death can shape a daughter's relationship to memory. Memorial Drive begins in Trethewey's birthplace of Gulfport, Mississippi, where she spent her early years doted on by her mother and extended family while Trethewey's father attended graduate school in New Orleans. After Turnbough's first divorce, mother and daughter moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where Turnbough met and married Joel Grimmette Jr., an abusive, controlling man who would wreak havoc on his wife and step-daughter. Atlanta is also the place to which the memoir eventually returns when, 20 years later, Trethewey finds herself back at the site of her greatest tragedy and face-to-face with its lingering artifacts. Like her earlier collections, Memorial Drive is written with a poet's keen ear for language and Trethewey's knack for historical detail and retrospection. Using descriptions of photographs, dreamscapes, memories of historical events (such as Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon in 1974) and even transcripts of the final phone calls between Turnbough and Grimmette, Trethewey builds a narrative that asks: How does one get intimately close to violence and still survive? Memorial Drive proves that the answer is neither simple nor singular, and memory is only one of the avenues we travel in our quest to remember those we've lost. The lives of our departed loved ones take on different weight and meaning as we live on without them. As Trethewey herself stated in an interview with BookPage, "The memory of my living mother grows every day; it continues to grow." Memorial Drive is the story of that memory, and of a daughter's deepening love, which has survived long after her mother's death. Destiny O. Birdsong. BookPageXTRA Online Review. BOOKPAGE, c2020. |
|
| Kirkus Reviews | 04/15/2020 |
| Reprising years that she tried to forget, a daughter unearths pain and trauma. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Trethewey, winner of a Pulitzer Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and many other awards, begins her graceful, moving memoir with her mother's murder in 1985. Her mother was 41; Trethewey, 19. In an effort to discover "the hidden, covered over, nearly erased," the author returned to the scene of the crime and her own buried memories. "I need now," she writes, "to make sense of our history, to understand the tragic course upon which my mother's life was set and the way my own life has been shaped by that legacy." Trethewey spent her early childhood in Mississippi, where she felt "protected, insulated from racial intimidation and violence." Her black mother, Gwendolyn Turnbough, was a Head Start administrator; her white father was rarely home, either working or pursuing a graduate degree in New Orleans. By the time 6-year-old Trethewey and her mother moved to Atlanta, the couple had divorced. The move, writes the author, "ended the world of my happy early childhood," and soon her comforting sense of "the two-ness" between mother and daughter was broken when Turnbough's new boyfriend, Joel, moved in. When her mother was at work, he found ways to torment Trethewey. "Always," she reveals, "there was some small thing he'd accuse me of, some transgression he invented in order to punish me." He beat her mother, and Trethewey could hear her pleading at night; her face would be swollen and bruised in the morning. Trethewey was in high school when her mother finally divorced Joel, and at last "everything felt normal." But in February 1984, he tried to kill Turnbough. He was arrested and imprisoned, but after his release, he threatened her again, and this time succeeded. Delicate prose distinguishes a narrative of tragedy and grief. 224pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2020. |
|
| Library Journal Prepub Alert | 01/08/2020 |
| A former U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, Trethewey relates a chilling story: when she was 19, her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Here she uses her corrosive grief to examine the challenges her mother faced in the segregated South and her own challenges as a "child of miscegenation" growing up in Mississippi, finally illuminating our understanding of ongoing racism and domestic abuse. With a 150,000-copy first printing. Barbara Hoffert. 224p. LJ Prepub Alert Online Review. LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2020. |
|
| Publishers Weekly | 12/23/2019 |
| In this beautifully composed, achingly sad memoir, U.S. poet laureate Trethewey (Monument) addresses the 1985 murder of her mother, Gwendolyn, at age 40, at the hands of her ex-husband, the author's former stepfather. Over the course of the narrative, Trethewey, 19 at the time of the killing, confronts her wrenching past, which she avoided for decades, as she tries to undo the "willed amnesia buried deep in me like a root." Born in 1966 in Mississippi, she recalls her childhood in the racist South, the daughter of an African-American mother and a white Canadian father who separated when she was a girl. Mother and daughter moved to Atlanta in 1972, and it's there that the nightmare begins, after Gwendolyn meets Joel, a Vietnam vet she marries and with whom she soon has a son named Joey. Trethewey chillingly ramps up the tension as Joel is revealed to be a calculating, controlling psychopath who psychologically torments the author and beats her mother. Gwendolyn eventually leaves Joel, but he continues to stalk her, and Trethewey includes ominous documents (including an urgent letter Gwendolyn wrote to police) that reveal the terrifying circumstances of her life before the murder, for which Joel was sent to prison. This profound story of the horrors of domestic abuse and a daughter's eternal love for her mother will linger long after the book's last page is turned. (July). 224p. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, c2019. |
|
9780062248572,dl.it[0].title
| Review Citations |
| New York Times Book Review | 09/06/2020 |
|
|
|