Q&A with Natasha Trethewey, author of Memorial Drive

by Laure Baudot

Natasha giving her final lecture as poet laureate at the Library of Congress. Photo credit: Amanda Reynolds.

Due out this August [2020], Memorial Drive, a powerful memoir by American poet and Pulitzer-Prize winner Natasha Trethewey’s seventh book, is already getting rave reviews. Trethewey, a former Poet Laureate of the United States, is currently on the board of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.

Memorial Drive recounts Trethewey’s mother’s murder by her mother’s ex-husband in 1985, when Trethewey was nineteen years old. Trethewey’s mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, who was Black, was first married to Eric Trethewey, a white Canadian man, who is Natasha’s father. Since interracial marriage was at the time illegal in Mississippi, where Trethewey was born, the two travelled to Ohio to marry. The couple divorced when Trethewey was six. Turnbough met and eventually divorced her second husband. Soon after, and following years of psychological and physical abuse, he shot and killed her.

In part the book represents Trethewey’s struggle to work through the traumatic experience, and can be seen in light of a spate of memoirs about trauma that have appeared in the United States in the last two decades. But the book is also an examination of America’s racist and sexist culture and an indictment of a system that Trethewey sees as complicit in her mother’s death. Memorial Drive is part of a body of literature exploring the intersection of race and gender in America, a category which includes Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and bell hooks’s Bone Black.

The book is far from being only an exploration of victimhood. The women in Trethewey’s account, particularly her mother, are strong, resourceful women who do their best to fight a system that is stacked against them. Trethewey makes clear that language and literature not only create individual identities but are crucial in enabling communal resistance. Myth and metaphor therefore are means of surviving trauma but also offer individuals – and their communities – the possibility of emancipation.

Trethewey draws on a variety of sources, including Greek mythology, Black-centered historical accounts, and the work of a variety of writers – Black, white, men, women. Meticulous and unflinching, as well as delicate and poetic, Memorial Drive is both an indictment of racism and gender-based violence and a stunning work of art. Memorial Drive is also timely given today’s public resistance movement against racial violence. A beautiful and important book.

The interview below has been condensed and edited.

LB: Congratulations on having written a book that is not only courageous and beautiful, but also timely.

You write about how a chance encounter with the assistant district attorney in Rockdale County was a major factor in influencing you to examine your past. Were there other factors that influenced the writing of this book, and what made you write it now?

NT: I don’t think the encounter with him influenced me. It gave me the documentary evidence to write the book. In the aftermath of winning the Pulitzer prize there were articles [about me] and in the back story my mother was mentioned as this victim, this murdered woman. It bothered me a lot to see her being treated as if she wasn’t significant in what made me the writer I am today. I [wanted] to make sure it was clear how important she was in my entire development as a writer.

LB: I was interested in what you chose to include in the book, particularly your decision to include a police transcript of the last phone conversation between your mother and her ex-husband. I found this very courageous. I’m also interested in its inclusion as an aesthetic choice. Unlike the rest of the narrative, the police transcript is unmediated by the poetic voice that drives the rest of the book. I was wondering why you chose to include it? Why include it verbatim when you could have summed it up?

NT: That’s something I thought long and hard about because I did think that there might be readers who might [wonder] why I wasn’t writing it…. This decision had to do with the fact that I could tell you how thoughtful and brilliant and compassionate and direct my mother was but I wanted you to see her for what she was. I wanted you to see how she would get the judge to get an arrest warrant. I wanted you to hear her voice.

LB: You underline the importance of language and literature for personal survival. Metaphors, for example, make meaning and also help one survive trauma. You write “to survive trauma, one must be able to tell a story about it.” Do memoir and poetry deal with trauma differently and, if so, why choose to write a memoir in prose rather than—for example—a memoir in verse?

NT: Since the beginning of my career as a poet I’ve dealt with grief and I’ve written plenty of elegies. My book Native Guard is dedicated to my mother. I think my whole project as a writer is elegiac. I think there were other things that needed a kind of expansiveness and meditation that weren’t expressed in prose…. [When I was writing this book,] I would be writing prose and then I would have to turn the page over and write a poem….I was working on this memoir and some things still came out in poems. But even as I was writing this prose memoir I couldn’t think of it without thinking of the terms of poetry and I thought of it as a long poem. Like [the chapter] Pardon, for example, that reads as a small prose poem. But I see the whole book as working in the same way as poems do for me. When I put together a collection, motifs come back again and again. This book feels similar in movement to my [poetry] books like Native Guard and Bellocq’s Ophelia.

LB: The portrait you draw of your mother’s ex-husband is someone who suffered from mental health issues, probably PTSD, and who was also manipulative, possessive, and cruel. Did you have any qualms about bringing a negative portrayal of a Black man into the public realm given the fact that Black men are regularly negatively stereotyped in North American culture?

NT: No, because I felt that, like my mother, I believe in restorative justice. Even when I was writing about him, I would always remember that he was a child once, that he was someone for whom things happened that made him the way that he was but he wasn’t simply like that because of his nature. I try to show that in the book as well, that whatever disfigurement he had had to do with his wounds….My mother says in the transcript that monsters once created can be redeemed….[The portrait in the book] is not a stereotypical portrait of [a] Black man—that would be racist—[Black men] are just human beings that undergo trauma that affects them in varied ways.

LB: This memoir is timely given the current attention on the racial violence faced by people of colour in the United States and Canada, and the subsequent, organized public outcry. In your book, the personal is political, and writing is an act not only of personal but also communal emancipation. What role—if any—do see your book having in today’s anti-racist movement?

NT: I think you said it. Because the personal is political our individual stories can help our larger collective knowledge about our experience—of women, of African American women of colour. It’s better to know these stories because then we know what we’re dealing with. It’s why testimonial can be powerful. [It shows] how much alike we are, that emotions like grief and loss and suffering are universal.

LB: You write that “all my adult life, I have lived with the guilt that I am implicated in my mother’s death—or, more precisely, that she is dead because I am not.” On one hand, your mother was a victim. On the other hand, she was not only a victim; she was also a strong-minded, creative, financially-independent woman. Strong women, including your grandmother and your aunt, permeate this book. I think you already alluded to this in the beginning of our conversation—Is there a redemptive aspect to your book? Did you write it in part to rescue your mother from victimhood, and, if so, have you been successful?

NT: I’d like to think so [—that I’ve been successful.] I think it’s impossible to read her own words and to read the impact she had on me and not see her positive influence. Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee/Calls back the lovely April of her prime….That’s in the book. It’s from Shakespeare’s Sonnet number three.