Memorial Drive

At nineteen, Natasha Trethewey felt her world crumble when her mother was shot twice to death by her stepfather. With penetrating wit and a passionate voice, Trethewey, a Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry, delves in this dazzling work -her first in prose- into the unfathomable experience of loss and recalls the brutal event that lastingly shaped the great author in which it was converted later. Through the narrative of the mistreatment suffered by both, she tries to understand the tragic fate of her mother, Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough. Page after page, she also makes us travel to the place where she lived during her childhood, in the south of the United States, deeply marked by racial segregation. "A child product of miscegenation" (her mother was black, her father white, and they married when their union was still illegal), the author delves into the origins of her constant feeling of existing on the margins, of not fitting in anywhere .