Even my mother’s death is redeemed in the story of my calling, made meaningful rather than merely senseless. It is the story I tell myself to survive.
Natasha Tretheway’s legacy is the guilt that “She [her mother] is dead because I am not.” By that, she means that her abusive step-father would have been imprisoned and therefore unable to shoot her mother had she not unwittingly deflected him from killing her first.
Here is the story of a mother-daughter bond so strong that she thought it could never break. Then divorce and a new man enter their lives, and her mother’s doting attention sours as she secretly endures a decade of physical and mental abuse. And the child, like a canary in the coal mine, is the first to feel his poison. But these are smart, strong women; it seems they will find a way to survive, even though we know from the start that they won’t.
The Pulitzer Prize winning Poet Laureate so adeptly weaves this memoir of her childhood as a biracial in the South during the Sixties and Seventies that one would never guess prose is not her main medium. I listened to her narrate her story on Audible [just over five hours], and no doubt will again and again. To learn more about her life and hear her read excerpts, watch this segment from the PBS News Hour