Natasha Trethewey: How not to escape from murder

Poet laureate Natasha Hethewey

In this heart-breaking book, we first meet Natasha Trethewey as a child in a warm and loving family: her parents, her mother's parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins in Gulfport, Louisiana.  

But after her parents' marriage ends, we see how her mother, Gwen Turnbough, becomes entrapped by a tar baby.  A newly divorced woman supporting herself by waiting tables in Atlanta, she meets a troubled Vietnam vet and becomes pregnant by him, then becomes snared into marrying him.

At this point, don't read the book before going to sleep at night.  If you do, you will keep reading far too late and as you realize that Gwen is accepting more and more cruelty and control, you will become too terrified to sleep.  I did this.

The next time I took up the book, I read straight through to the end at 6 am, then cried until 7 am while obsessively thinking about what steps Gwen could have taken to save herself.  I woke up at noon and immediately searched Natasha and her family on the internet to learn more, spending most of the day swamped in the dismal trajectory of their lives.

Memorial Drive is terrifying, disturbing.  Natasha, a former US Poet Laureate, writes succinctly and with a poet's voice.  The title is the street in Atlanta to which Gwen moved after escaping from her murderous second husband when she was 40 years old.

It's horrible to observe how Natasha's mother shrinks and loses her sense of self as this man dominates her.  We see young Natasha also lose her sense of who she is and become imprisoned by this man.

In the second half of the book, Natasha the adult tries to come to terms with how her mother struggled to escape from this man but was eventually killed by him.  I wish it had been fiction.  

I was angry at Gwen's inability to leave him, to say no and walk out.  I remembered many years of my own marriage when I should have walked away but lacked the courage to strike out on my own with three kids.

Twenty years later, a police officer gives Natasha the trial records, including statements written by her mother and transcripts of a phone conversation that was going to be used as evidence to arrest Gwen's step-father.  She includes them in this book.

I was particularly upset to read his words threatening Gwen.  His lunacy is infuriating but all too familiar to abused wives: "If I can't have her, nobody will."  As I lay awake crying and proposing ways she could have saved herself, I also thought of all the women killed by their husbands or partners.

Then I thought of times when I had given up myself to meet the needs of others, not standing up for myself.  Like me, Gwen is so passive as her killer talks and talks, making threats, in a phone call being recorded.

She's making the recording as evidence to get an arrest warrant for him, but I wish Gwen would hang up and flee to a neighbor's apartment.  She could take her 14-year-old son with her.  

It was so pointless to lie awake thinking of things she could have done, but I could not stop until finally I told myself to place her in God's hands.  All the abused women of the world are cherished in God's loving hands.

Yes, the book is well-written.  It's poetic.  But it was painful to read... too evocative of the patient kindness of the victim and the self-excusing violent thinking of the rapist.

Takeway--how NOT to escape from murder:

Stay kind to the person abusing you.

Get date-raped by someone who wants to marry you.

Think first of your kids' welfare, not your own.

Plan a way to escape in the distant future, say ten years away.

Keep forgiving him when he beats you up.

Don't tell anyone about your problems at home.

Whistle a happy tune no matter how sad you are.

Keep arguing with him and hoping he'll listen to reason.

Never say no to him.

Remember that God and the church frown on divorce.

Let him hold you to your vow "'til death us do part."