Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir
NATASHA TRETHEWEY
(BLOOMSBURY CIRCUS, 224 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • Tel 020 7799 4064

The mood and the temper of this intensely private memoir by Natasha Trethewey, a former American poet ­laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, feels a little like the consequences of shattering a precious mirror. You stare down at what has happened, almost disbelieving. You know that it can never be reassembled: it has broken into too many pieces. And yet, finally, there is no alternative to suffering the pain of trying, trying, and yet again trying, because that ­mirror holds up a likeness to you yourself.

Such is this piece of writing, which is the difficult bringing into being, step by dragging step, of an account of the murder of Natasha Trethewey’s young and petite mother by her stepfather, a self-regarding brute of a man called Big Joe, an act so painful to contemplate, or even to recall, that it has taken more than 30 years for her to bring the bewildering, devastating horror of it all back into focus, to make it sufficiently recoverable for her to be able to recount it to others, to make it livable with and credible, even to herself.