First published 2020
Natasha Trethewey was nineteen when her former stepfather murdered her mother in Atlanta. The Pulitzer Prize winning poet returns to this devastating loss to understand how it formed her as an artist. She traces her mother's life in the segregated South and her own childhood as a mixed race girl in Mississippi. Trethewey examines the years leading to the 1985 crime on Memorial Drive. She explores how grief and trauma intersected with her coming of age. The book moves between her mother's history and her own sense of not belonging anywhere. Trethewey shows how violence, love, and survival became the foundation of her work. She reveals how a daughter processes unthinkable loss and transforms it into art.
Genres: african-american, autobiography, biography-memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: coming-of-age, grief
Setting: Atlanta, Mississippi
Period: 1985
213 pages · Hardcover · Ecco
Content warnings: death