Review: Trethewey, Memorial Drive (2020)

[truepenny]

Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir by Natasha Trethewey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I've tried to start this review 3 times and each time come up empty-handed.

So. This is a book by Natasha Trethewey, a former US poet laureate. It is centered on her mother's murder. One strand is talking about family history and about who Gwendolyn Turnbough was. One strand is about domestic abuse and how Trethewey's stepfather went from faintly creepy to abuser to murderer. And one strand is about Trethewey, as an adult, trying to come to grips with a chunk of her life she has tried strenuously to forget but which she cannot shed. And, I think, trying to figure out how her mother ended up there, on that day, how she came to be murdered.

Trethewey's stepfather is a perfect example of why asking why don't women leave abusive partners? is asking the wrong question. Because it's not that she didn't leave. She did. It's that he wouldn't let her go, that to him killing her was (a) a reasonable option and (b) preferable to acknowledging in any way that she did not belong to him. The most harrowing part of the book is the seemingly endless transcription of a telephone call in which he shows himself incapable of recognizing, never mind respecting, that his ex-wife has a subject position of her own, that she exists outside his desires. Their conversation is a death spiral, going over and over the same ground, and ending finally in murder.

This book is full of regret and grief. It is beautifully and lucidly written. It is unsparing.



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