‘Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir’ Drama Series Based On Book In Works At Sony Pictures TV
EXCLUSIVE: In a competitive situation, Sony Pictures Television has optioned Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey’s bestselling book Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, for development as a drama series. A search for a writer is underway.
The book, published by Ecco/HarperCollins in July, is described as a chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy.
The memoir was an instant New York Time bestseller. It also was named a New York Times 2020 Notable Book and was named among the Ten Best Books of 2020 by both Time and The Washington Post. It is also a finalist for the 2021 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and is an NPR and Shelf Awareneness Best Book of the Year.
In the book, in which Trethewey confronts the horror of her mother’s murder, she writes “To survive trauma, one must be able to tell a story about it.”
Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, and most recently, Monument: Poems New and Selected (2018). Her book of non-fiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast appeared in 2010. She has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She is a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2017 she received the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities and, in 2019, she was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. Currently, she is Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. Trethewey is repped by ICM Partners on behalf of Rob McQuilkin at Massie & McQuilkin.
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