Recent Reading: Memorial Drive: A daughter's memoir

 

Yesterday I finished reading Natasha Tretheway's memoir about her mother's death and how that death has affected Trethewey over the last thirty years. Let me just say that the book, especially the second half, is emotionally intense. I think the book is very good, but if you are not prepared for a profoundly sad ending to the book you might want to steer clear of this book. 

In a number of ways, Trethewey's book reminds me of Carolyn Forche's What You Have Heard Is True. Both are memoirs written by women who are both professional poets. Both are short (approximately 200 pages) books with a good amount of white space on the pages. Both books are about experiences that happened at least thirty years earlier. Both books focus on how violent death many years earlier has affected them. Both books are written with extreme attention paid to carefully constructed, yet, often simple, sentences. And both books are about profoundly sad events.