Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 2

Part 1, Chapters 3-5

Part 1, Chapters 6-8

Part 2, Chapters 9-11

Part 2, Chapters 12-14

Part 2, Chapters 15-18

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Growing Up Biracial

Natasha Trethewey was born one year before the Supreme Court’s landmark Loving v. Virginia decision, which legalized interracial marriages throughout the country. Her parents conceived her and married a short while before, which made her existence in Mississippi both illegal and an affront to the legacy of White supremacy that the South steadfastly held on to, despite the numerous advances made during the Civil Rights era in which Trethewey was born.

Natasha explores what her birth meant to each of her parents. Both Gwen and Rick believed that she had the best of both worlds—Black and White, American and Canadian, Southern and Northern—but, they had different ideas about what her racial identity would mean in the post-Civil Rights world. Rick rightly believed that her identity would give her a great deal to say, in writing, about the nature of race in the United States. He erroneously believed that her existence marked a new era, one in which the idea of race would become meaningless, particularly as a determinant in people’s lives. Gwen, knowing that her daughter would be regarded as Black, as children with diverse racial backgrounds had always been, had no such delusions.

After Rick divorced Gwen and became less present in their lives, Gwen and Natasha immersed themselves in Black life in Atlanta, which also meant observing the ways in which White people reacted to their recent presences in the city’s expanding suburbs. Events such as white flight, encapsulated by a neighborhood girl’s joke about it, reminded Natasha of which side of the color line she belonged. Even in instances in which White people expressed curiosity about her race, they remained certain that she was not White; though, her expression of her Blackness also did not coincide with their preconceived ideas.

Trethewey’s anecdotes about growing up biracial reiterate many of her parents’ concerns about the ways in which others would try to confine her through categorization. Her act of writing, particularly her explorations of how her life has been defined by Southern history and culture, is her way of reassessing the language that was developed both to define her and to negate her existence.

Writing as an Act of Resistance and Rebellion

Though Rick declared that Natasha would become a writer long before the little girl developed an aptitude for it, Natasha identifies the act of writing as key in the development of her voice and in helping her resist Joel’s efforts to control her. Writing became a method of escapism for her, who developed an interest in short story writing, perhaps partly influenced by her father, who also wrote short stories in which she was featured as a character. Her father’s early lessons about literature showed Natasha the ways in which books and writing could offer both an escape and a means of usurping control of one’s personal narrative. Unable to escape the violence in her home, Natasha wrote a story about a faraway land that drew the attention of her teacher, Mrs. Messick, and convinced her that she could make a career out of writing when she grew up. Threatened by Natasha’s imagination and her early expression of purpose, Joel tried to negate the child’s ability, which resulted in Gwen making a rare display of protest against Joel’s efforts to control and subordinate Natasha and Gwen.

To aid Natasha in coping with the pressures at home, Gwen gave her daughter a diary. After Natasha discovered that Joel had broken the lock to it and was reading her entries, she began to pen missives directed toward him, enumerating his myriad acts of hostility toward her and her mother. The diary—a place in which to express private thoughts—thus became an instrument of her resistance toward her stepfather. Additionally, Natasha’s pursuit of writing—becoming an editor of the school newspaper and joining the staff of the school literary journal—stood in direct contrast to Joel’s ideas about what girls and women ought to do.

Later in life, Natasha’s act of writing the memoir, which incorporates the physical evidence of Gwen’s attempts to tell her story, is a statement of defiance against those who did not take Gwen’s accusations of Joel seriously. It is also her attempt to confront a history that she had long buried, both to make sense of her mother’s death and its impact on who Natasha became.

Domestic Violence and the Erasure of Identity

Natasha uses a flawed photograph of her mother—one in which the light from a flash nearly obliterated her face in the image—as a metaphor for her mother’s disappearance from existence. Arguably, Gwen began her disappearing act long before she took her final portrait, when Joel made his first successful efforts to subordinate Gwen, starting with convincing her not to go to Jimmy Carter’s inauguration. Not long thereafter, it seemed, the beatings began.

Though Gwen continued to function as a parent and as a social worker, Natasha describes all the ways in which Joel had succeeded in erasing her mother’s identity until she disappeared completely. In some instances, this is made literal through her drastic weight loss and her silence about the abuse that took place in their home. Rick’s observation, after Gwen’s death, that the woman in the portrait looked nothing like the one that he had married indicate to the reader that there was a difference even between the woman Natasha had known and the one her father had.

Natasha also details the ways in which society was complicit in the silence that she, her brother, and her mother kept. Mrs. Messick’s trivialization of the episode, the police’s acceptance of Joel’s lies over her mother’s pleas for help, and even a women’s shelter worker’s dismissal of Natasha’s warnings of danger all signaled a general tolerance for domestic violence as a private problem. This belief made it nearly impossible for women to escape their abusers, despite taking every necessary step to leave and to hold their abusers legally accountable. Thus, if Gwen’s death was predetermined, this was not due to fate, but due to a system that frequently fails to protect women and to educate them about the signs of domestic violence.