https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/19/natasha-trethewey-i-decided-i-was-going-to-be-the-one-to-tell-my-mothers-story

The former US poet laureate on writing about her murdered mother and the symbolism of Confederate monuments

• Read an extract from Memorial Drive
  

Natasha Trethewey was the US poet laureate from 2012 to 2014. Her Pulitzer prize-winning work highlights the racial and historical inequities of America and the ongoing personal expense of those injustices. Her memoir, Memorial Drive, tells the story of her mother Gwendolyn’s second marriage to a man who abused and then murdered her when Trethewey was 19 years old.

Reading your memoir, I got the sense you have been waiting your whole life to write it…
It did feel that way. For much of my life I felt I was running away from my past but once I was writing the book I realised I had always been working my way back towards it – I was letting out the wail that I hadn’t let out even when she died 35 years ago.