Bequeath - by Melora Wolff (Paperback)

About the Book

"The ten personal essays in Bequeath explore the meaning of bequests received by Melora Wolff over the past fifty years from teachers, schoolmates, authors, recluses, criminals, and generations of family members. Letters, ticket stubs, a car, a Nabokov novel first read in a writing seminar-these passed-down objects evoke legacies of relationships. The essays work cumulatively to form a memoir of female maturation amid dense environments: an eccentric city school; a storied mansion in New York City; a summer rental house shared with mother, sister, and father; and the idealistic atmosphere of 1970s feminism. As the essays appear in chronological order, the persona ages from seven years old to sixty. The settings are predominantly parks, homes, and streets of New York-a place by turns dangerous, thrilling, illusory, fatal-that shapes the author's persona as much as her father, a musician and WWII non-com veteran who expressed himself through jazz, games, and TV. Memories of city and family shape the persona's perceptions of men, women, loss, and inheritance, troubled by events of power and destruction and often returning to the central figure of her father. Wolff's factual, detailed essays are built like short stories, made of scenes, dialogue, and detailed characters. The narrator confuses the lines between her real life and an imagined one, as the essays merge techniques of fiction and nonfiction. Lovers of stories, essays, and memoirs will find much to entice them in this unusual, moving collection of personal reflections and crystalline speculative reveries. Eschewing many familiar conventions of the essay form and featuring a bold structure with unexpected entanglements of history and fantasy, Bequeath bestows on readers an evocative expression of candor, grief, and love"--

Book Synopsis

What should we do with the things we inherit? In ten intimate essays as vivid as fiction and as varied as music, Melora Wolff's Bequeath presents a flawed, funny, impressionable narrator who tries to solve the mysteries of bequeathed artifacts, family myths, and haunting mistakes--while also figuring out how to grow up in dangerous, glamorous 1970s New York City.

With a wide range of voices--comic, lyric, collective, personal, joyful, and deeply elegiac--Wolff pays homage to her musician father and family as she roams a past rich with cultural touchstones and indelible characters, from West Side Story and Lost in Space to Leonard Bernstein and Gloria Steinem. Bequeath explores the legacies we impose and bestow on one another.

Review Quotes

"....A childhood essay on predatory violence is also a reinvention of a memory, reminiscent of Ian McEwan's Atonement, in that the most vulnerable player in the piece exploits the most agency, a subversion of the age-old power dynamic of men against girls...The act of retelling is an act of restoration for Melora Wolff--not only of memories but of self...Wolff's final essay is a gift to her mother -- it is she who introduces fantasy to the daughter, who makes a writer of her."--Heavy Feather Review

"Melora Wolff's Bequeath radiates intelligence. In this eloquent collection of linked essays, Wolff takes the reader on a journey through the "long corridors" of individual and collective memory. Whether considering absence as tangible and embodied, the ways places can be "haunted" by complex histories, or the fine line between recollection and imagination, Wolff's essays are linked by a shared investment in the nature of storytelling...For Wolff, recollection is a radical act, an affirmation of meaning, connection...Melora Wolff's Bequeath is a brave, bold, and profound meditation on the nature of memory...This is an exquisite book by a supremely gifted writer."--Tupelo Quarterly

"This is a memoir to sink into, to enjoy for its content, and for the words and images that allow readers to enter into a specific time and place and revel in its uniqueness. This is the author's childhood, the fabric of her life and her family and her growing years, a youth that is not lost but brought to exquisite life."--Los Angeles Review

"Wolff, through skillfully paced and masterful language brings the images that inhabit her memory onto the substrate of the readers own psyche. Reading her is like entering a forest where the quality of light shifts from the stark illumination of a summer meadow to the subtle softness of the understory. She presents a meandering inquiry into her own remembrances, questioning her memory and responding in reflection in a recursive dialogue. It is here, in this dialogue, that the reader is brought in close and can reflect on universal experiences."--Compulsive Reader

"Bequeath is a collection that reads like a memoir, or even more: a succession of memoirs. Each essay here is as layered and fully rendered as a book. The voice is assured, the narrative movements as inevitable as they are unpredictable. Tracing the arc of a life and a family--her own--Wolff reminds us of all we know and all we never know, the insufficiency of memory and also its necessity."--David L. Ulin, author of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles

"Melora Wolff's memoir in essays brings thrillingly to life the vanished New York of her childhood and adolescence in the 1970s, along with her beloved parents and friends. In glorious prose, Wolff conjures textures, ideals, and emotions--from a girl's early experience of joy to a city's rampant paranoia and the eager futurism of Lost in Space. Bequeath is a beautiful, memorable book."--Claire Messud, author of Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write: An Autobiography in Essays

"These magical essays shimmer with tenderness and regret, with sensuous allusion, joy, self-deprecating humor, and wry intelligence. The memories are so successfully evoked that the question then becomes: Does the present stand a chance, now that the past has been recaptured?"--Phillip Lopate, author of A Year and a Day: An Experiment in Essays

About the Author

Melora Wolff's work has appeared in publications such as Brick, the New York Times, the Normal School, Best American Fantasy, Speculative Nonfiction, and Every Father's Daughter: Twenty-Four Women Writers Remember Their Fathers, and has received multiple Notable Essay of the Year citations from Best American Essays. She is director of creative writing at Skidmore College.