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Memoir, as opposed to autobiography, is usually more narrowly focused and not meant to be a comprehensive, cradle-to-grave story or highly detailed. And “Memorial Drive” is not.
There is no discussion of Trethewey’s years of college study, her teaching career, her several books of poetry or her many honors.
This gigantic absence is the most unusual feature of the book Trethewey’s revelation that she had in fact repressed, buried, avoided a large chunk of her life in a kind of “willed amnesia,” “mute avoidance of my past” caused, understandably enough, by the murder of her mother.
On June 5, 1985, Trethewey’s ex-stepfather shot and killed her mother Gwendolyn in Atlanta, Georgia.