Natasha Trethewey, two-term U.S. Poet Laureate, forges a serious, poignant work of remembrance with Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir. Her mother, Gwen, is the focus of this book: the daughter's memories and what she's forgotten, and, pointedly, the mother's murder at the hands of her second ex-husband. The setting of the murder, just off Memorial Drive in Atlanta, Ga., gives the book its title. Trethewey is the daughter of an African American mother and a white Canadian father whose marriage was illegal in the U.S.; she was born just before the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case struck down laws banning interracial marriage. Trethewey's early upbringing in Mississippi, with her doting extended maternal family, shifts with the mother and daughter's move to Atlanta when the marriage unravels. There Gwen meets the man who becomes her second husband, and who ends her life.
While this central event is harrowing, Memorial Drive does not focus only there. Trethewey ruminates on memory and forgetfulness in this compelling, gracefully and gorgeously rendered memoir. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia