Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir

Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (2020) is the second nonfiction work by Natasha Trethewey. Trethewey is a former US poet laureate (2012) and former poet laureate of her native Mississippi. Her first work of creative nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, was released in 2010, five years after the disastrous Hurricane Katrina. In this work, Trethewey remembers her childhood in Gulfport and her maternal family there—memories that she revisits in Memorial Drive. Born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966, Trethewey is the author of five collections of poetry: Domestic Work (2000), Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002), Native Guard (2006)—which includes the titular poem "Elegy for the Native Guards"—Thrall (2012), and Monument: Poems New and Selected (2018). She is also the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Native Guard. Formerly a professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, she now teaches at Northwestern University, where she is Board of Trustees Professor of English.

Note: This guide quotes and obscures Trethewey’s use of the n-word.

Plot Summary

Memorial Drive is a memoir that copes with the circumstances that led up to the death of the author’s mother, Gwendolyn Turnbough. The book takes its name from Atlanta’s major thoroughfare, where Natasha last lived with her mother, on and off, during her college years. It also bears significance as the site of Stone Mountain—a Confederate monument—and, metaphorically, as a site of memory and reckoning.

Natasha uses a professional portrait of her mother, Gwen, as a link to memories of her mother before she was murdered by her second ex-husband, Joel Grimmette. At this point, Gwen believed that she was starting anew and had finally escaped the cycle of abuse in which she had been trapped. The portrait started Natasha on a journey to go back to the place on Memorial Drive where her mother had been killed, thereby revisiting memories of the tragedy that she had long repressed.

Natasha recalls Gwen’s life from long before Natasha’s birth—her birth in New Orleans, her lineage in Gulfport, Mississippi, and Gwen’s courtship with Rick Trethewey at their university in Kentucky. By the time Natasha was born in 1966, Gwen and Rick had settled in Gwen’s hometown of North Gulfport, where Rick integrated himself into the community and into Gwen’s family. But the couple faced harassment from local White residents who were infuriated by the sight of an interracial couple. Rick began to split his time between North Gulfport and New Orleans after enrolling in graduate school there in the early-1970s. Not long thereafter, Gwen and Rick drifted apart and eventually divorced. Gwen left her hometown and moved with Natasha to Atlanta, where Gwen first took a job as a cocktail waitress to support them. Around this time, Gwen met Joel. In the mid-1970s, Natasha returned to Atlanta from a summer vacation with relatives in Mississippi to find out that her mother had married Joel and that Natasha would soon have a younger brother.

Joel, who had always seemed suspicious to Natasha, first exhibited abusive behavior toward her. Then, Natasha found out that he was abusing her mother. Unable to get her mother to leave or to get the adults around her to care, Natasha began to assert herself against Joel through her writing. Toward the end of her high school years, Gwen finally summoned the courage to leave Joel, who refused to stay out of Gwen’s life, despite her divorcing him. In 1985, when Natasha was in college, Joel murdered her mother in front of Gwen’s apartment complex with two gunshots.

For many years, even after returning to Atlanta to take a teaching job, Natasha avoided any place that reminded her of her mother’s murder, particularly the DeKalb County Courthouse. Then, while having a drink in a bar with her husband, Brett, a strange man introduced himself. The man’s wife revealed that he had been the first police officer on the scene after Gwen’s murder, and that he recalled that event every day. The man provided Natasha with the files related to her mother’s death, which the courthouse intended to purge. Going through the files, Natasha found the transcript of Gwen’s final phone calls with Joel. The evidence offered further context around the circumstances of Gwen’s death, including the relative inaction which led to her murder.

At the end of the book, Natasha describes her memoir as both an attempt to grapple with memories that she had long buried, and to give her mother’s life meaning beyond the tragedy that cut her existence short.