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Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent's Death

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Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent's Death

By: Nancy K. Miller  

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Description:
How do we live with our parents after their death? How do we tell their story when they are gone? These questions are the subject of Nancy K. Miller's moving new book, "Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent's Death". Melding the details of her own experience with the familial biographies of well-known contemporary writers, Miller recreates a common experience - the loss of a father or a mother - and exposes the often tortuous paths of mourning and attachment that we follow in the wake of loss. In the process, she offers pieces of personal history, revealing the mixed emotions provoked by her mother's sudden death from cancer and her father's painful struggle with Parkinson's disease. Memoirs about the loss of parents show how enmeshed in the family plot we have been and the price of our complicity in its stories.The death of parents forces us to rethink our lives, to reread ourselves. We read for what we need to find. Sometimes, we also find what we didn't know we needed. Shifting back and forth between literature and life, Miller engages with other writers but also speaks to readers for whom these stories of loss will be poignantly familiar. What emerges is an innovative form of life-writing - the autobiography of a New York Jewish daughter, a childless woman, a literary critic - created in complex counterpoint both to contemporary memoirs and to our culture's scenarios of high-tech dying."Bequest and Betrayal" works through the passionate ambivalence of generational bonds and builds to its final chapter, an intimate portrait of Miller's father, a lawyer facing the end of his life and career. Reading the fragmentary pages of her father's diaries, Miller records the crisis of middle-class family and charts the steady decline of a man's body and mind. Losing parents and writing about their absence leads us to acknowledge our own mortality, to think anew about how we want to live the rest of our lives. "Bequest and Betrayal" explores the complicated ways in which mourning the loss of parents ultimately produces a story we can live with, a story that lets us move on.

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
untitled - This is the first work of literary criticism that I read like a novel; I simply couldn't put it down. By combining literary criticism and autobiography, Miller pushes the boundaries of literary criticism in productive ways and forces us to rethink the field. Finally a book I can recommend and give to all my friends, regardless of whether they are academics.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Scholarly & readable-- what a combination! - Nancy K. Miller is one of my favorite contemporary feminist theorists. This study of several "Memoirs" written by adult children of deceased parents kept me interested in ways that scholarship often does not (I usually read it for work, not pleasure-- this book combined the two). With this book, you should also read Maus : A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman, because one of the most fascinating chapters is a study of Spiegelman's gripping Holocaust narratives. Autobiography shapes all writing in ways that critics are really just beginning to explore-- Dr. Miller is at the forefront of this field and deservedly so.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Beginning Real Life - The opening line of Bequest & Betrayal came as a shock of recognition: "When my mother died, I thought my real life would begin." I read avidly the beginning pages, and then, suddenly, got frightened and stopped. What did it mean for me, a 28-year-old, to identify so strongly with a woman writing about her mother's death? Between the resentment and forgiveness that connect parents and children, Miller shows us, is the possibility of realization. We can realize that there is a separation between our parents' lives and our own, their stories about parents and children and our own stories. The succession of generations-dying parents and newly born children-does not necessarily resolve conflict, nor is it the only way toward realization. The chain of generations can be broken: the absence of reconciliation can be lived with. Can I begin to live my real life now?

For me, a first generation immigrant, family has been a source of both identity and difference, something essential but secret, unknown to others, and incompatible with public American life. In reading Bequest & Betrayal, the memoir of a woman who is not like me at all, according to the conventional terms we use to think of identity, I found that it was nevertheless family that linked us, the simple fact that we are all entangled in family plots of some kind. Families not only give us our unique differences and tribal markers but can become the foundation of non-familial communities. Differences between people are complicated, not always predictable; they don't always fall along party lines.

I often tend to read "too autobiographically" but had never encountered an author who freely confessed to the same extravagance. I thought that I read for what I needed because that was the only way I would find myself in stories about Americans not quite like me. Now I suddenly discovered that someone else, maybe everyone, reads this way. The cross-generational and cross-cultural identification that was the basis of my private reading experience became part of a publicly shared experience. If we are allowed to take seriously, as Miller encourages us to do, the "bonds of paper" that connect generations who don't share bonds of blood, then communal life need not depend solely on our parents or the body of the family.

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