"Memorial Drive" by Natasha Trethewey

In childhood, begin our stories, and those stories influence all the chapters to come in the great epic novel of our lives.  Natasha Trethewey, in her book, Memorial Drive:  A Daughter’s Memoir (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2020) dares to grapple with the murder of her mother and the way that horrific event propels her into adulthood.  Trethewey, a Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry in 2007, offers us a spare and elegiac tracing through the shards of memory.  In the end, we are left with the potent realization that what is missing always remains with us, including the dead.

Trethewey brackets her story the question:  “Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?”  Born in Gulfport, Mississippi, she spends her childhood moving from her birthplace to Atlanta, Georgia, and back again as her parents’ marriage falls apart and her mother remarries a Vietnam vet named Joel.  After the second marriage, Natasha welcomes the birth of a half-brother, but there is an ominous shadow over their lives.  Joel suffers from PTSD and the after-effects of his time in the military.  His behavior is strange, violent, and belligerent; he picks on Natasha and harasses her when her mother is at work.  This malevolent darkness awakens her to the power of story and lays the foundation for her future as a writer even as it spells tragedy for her mother and this new cobbled-together family.  Trethewey writes, “I need now 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.”

Language offers redemption.  She immerses herself in symbol and metaphor, the poetics of living in extremis.  She rages in her diary, knowing Joel is reading it.  She loses herself in story, checking out books from the library, as many as she can, to lose herself in reading.  One metaphor that she uses to convey the losses she suffers is the phantom pain an amputee experiences.  It is the figurative language of compartmentalization—escaping into story from the force that threatens to overwhelm her.

She focuses on a belt made of bullets that her mother wears, a strange accessory, ironic in light of her eventual death.  The bullet belt sticks in Trethewey’s mind, a harbinger of things to come where she will have a front row seat at her family’s apocalyptic moment when bullets shatter their lives.  It is again a powerful symbol.  She describes the belt as “cold metal brushing my hand,” and that her mother’s body was literally “ringed in the objects of her undoing.”

Trethewey analyzes what she sees as her own culpability in her mother’s fate.  Joel shows up at a high school football game where she is a cheerleader.  He sits in the stands directly in front of where she is cheering on the track.  She attempts to make nice with him, smiling and waving.  She would not find out until later that he had a gun in his pocket and had decided to kill her in front of the crowd to get back at her mother, but he lost his nerve.  In retrospect, in that moment of smiling and waving to him, she feels she escaped her own murder but sealed her mother’s fate.  Upon reflection, Trethewey comes to see her desperate attempts to placate the abuser, Joel, as a “kind of magical thinking,” believing that she can somehow mitigate the anger and irrational violence of her stepfather and prevent tragedy from happening.  In the transcriptions of Joel and her mother’s final phone calls, it is clear he plans to follow through on his threats.  He uses the textbook language.  Even the art he creates in the final days is prescient.  Trethewey describes it as “black negative space surrounding a misshapen bird that may as well have been the symbol of his soul.”

Natasha, the child, hears the unbearable sounds of her mother being beaten at night.  She wants to protect her, to jump in front of her when the bullet arrives.  Trethewey, the adult, realizes the futility of this:  “Look at you.  Even now you think you can write yourself away from that girl you were, distance yourself in the second person, as if you weren’t the one to whom any of this happened.”  Writing is the only way through the maelstrom of her past.  She longs to find peace with her unique “geography of fate.”  That wound, again, cannot be healed.  In the end, she realizes the story is the only “arc and meaning of our lives.”  She says, “To survive trauma, one must be able to tell a story about it.”  Story redeems; it converts experience into understanding and acceptance.

This is a searing, painful examination of life and love and murder played out in the shadowlands of the American south.  Natasha Trethewey spares us nothing.  She brings us in close to probe that wound that never heals, the one that continues to burn through the years, leaving only phantom pain and memory to carry us forward.