Nothing [Trethewey] has written drills down into her past, and her family's, as powerfully as Memorial Drive. It is a controlled burn of chaos and intellection; it is a memoir that will really lay you out…This is a book with a slow, steady build. This is restraint in service to release…By its midpoint, Memorial Drive is merely a quite good memoir. The book's second half, like the wall of a hurricane after the eye calmly passes over, is the destructor.