In this chilling but beautifully written memoir, US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winning Natasha Trethewey uses her exquisite poetic crafting to revisit and confront the defining traumatic moment of her life: the murder of her mother by her stepfather.

It is a devastating book, written in a lyrical voice, full of grief, regret and guilt over the awful burst of violence that ruptured her life. The memoir acts as a form of reckoning for the writer, an intimate exploration of her girlhood as a daughter of ‘miscegenation’ and a moving, intimate account of the course of her mother’s life, right up until its tragic end. With penetrating insight and a wistful, elegiac voice, Trethewey masterfully finds words to explore the unspeakable.

There is a clear sense of her desperation throughout: she is desperate to understand what happened, why it happened and how it was allowed to happen. But her investigation is rarely angry, does not look to point blame on inactive authorities or locate the crime in any racial contexts, it is instead something much more intimate and restrained, a rumination on grief and how it has shaped her both as a writer and as a woman. The inclusion of evidence- transcribed phone conversations, her mother’s own words and police reports- adds a heart-wrenching impact to Trethewey’s own reflections.

I cannot imagine what Trethewey had to go through to write this book. As with any other memoir about trauma and loss, I am in awe at the writer’s ability to make sense of something so senseless.