At nineteen, Natasha Trethewey felt her world crumble when her stepfather killed her mother with two bullets. With penetrating acuity and a passionate voice, Trethewey, a Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry, delves in this dazzling work—her first in prose—into the unfathomable experience of loss and recalls the brutal event that lastingly shaped the great author into whom was later converted. Through the narration of the abuse suffered by both of her, she tries to understand the tragic fate of her mother, she also makes us travel to the place where she lived during her childhood, in the southern United States. . Trethewey offers us a beautiful work of great poetic force, a story that delves into the abysses of personal history and the history of a country to reveal a pain that extends to the present. This is a captivating, beautiful, brave and devastating book.