Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent's Death - Softcover

Miller, Nancy K.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0253213797 ISBN 13: 9780253213792

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2000

Synopsis

In a book that will change the ways we think about autobiography and criticism, Nancy K. Miller produces poignant revelations about what it means to live with a dying parent―as a son or daughter, as well as the difference that gender makes in such a painful situation. In Bequest and Betrayal, she develops an original feminist perspective by counterpointing lyrical introspection about her own grief with critical insights into memoirs by Simone de Beauvoir, Philip Roth, Art Spiegelman, Susan Cheever, Carolyn Steedman, and Annie Ernaux." ―Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, co-authors of The Madwoman in the Attic, No Man's Land, and The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women

Miller's use of the memoir form offers a new model of serious criticism, and a way of imagining community through ‘bonds of paper’ as well as ‘bonds of blood.’" ―Elaine Showalter, London Review of Books

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Nancy K. Miller is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York. She is author of Getting Personal and Subject to Change.

From Kirkus Reviews:

An unsatisfying amalgam of autobiography and literary criticism that achieves the dubious distinction of rendering its subject less, not more, interesting. Miller (English/City Univ. of New York; Getting Personal, not reviewed) examines Philip Roth's Patrimony, Simone de Beauvoir's A Very Easy Death, Art Spiegelman's Maus, and several other memoirs about the death of a parent. She leavens her didactic analyses (which rely heavily on feminist and psychoanalytic theory) with brief passages of autobiography. These fragments are meant to bolster her arguments and, more importantly, to demonstrate a correlation between the literary task of memorializing a dead parent and her own attempts to come to terms with the deaths of her mother and father. But the short personal sections, most less than a page, provide only glimpses of Miller's uneasy relationship with her parents. Too brief to sustain narrative momentum and too disjointed to develop cumulative emotional power, these details- -which hint of a long-running ``war'' with her mother and a sense of regret about her own childlessness--seem coy and elusive in the absence of context. Considering her willingness to divine the psychological motives of Roth and company, this elusiveness is curious. Miller ably delineates the pitfalls memoirists encounter: the fear of invading privacy balanced with the desire for self- knowledge; the danger of self-censorship inherent in family narrative; and most provocatively, the disturbing mix of regret and relief many feel at a parent's death. But ultimately she is more successful at drawing connections among the books she discusses than at using them to illuminate her personal struggle. ``The critic's classic move is to track the places where the autobiographer seems blind to the screen of his own self- disclosure,'' Miller notes. This volume would be more compelling if Miller examined her own motives more closely. (photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0253213797
• ISBN 13: 9780253213792
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208