RaveColumbia JournalTrethewey’s memoir is a lyric confrontation with grief—the way it shapes and reshapes memory over time, permeating even those decades preceding loss. The author’s childhood recollections, laced with lessons on myth and metaphor, draw a detailed backdrop to her early years as a mixed-raced child in the segregated South—the South her father, a white Canadian citizen, knew little about, and her mother, a black woman from Mississippi, knew well ... Towards the end of the book, she returns to the dream from its opening, almost as if coming full circle. I was able to see more of it, in that second reading, to understand it more deeply. But in grief there is hardly a coming full circle; it tends to be broken off somewhere, to disorient the search. Still, as we look for the point where the ends of our grief meet, we may, like Trethewey, end up coming back to a place we’d vowed never to return to. Even that return, it seems, is more akin to driving the 285 highway, the bypass loop, than it is to an arrival. The book ends on the road, too—this time only Trethewey and her mother in the car—a closing which is also a movement.
