cover image Bequest & Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent's Death

Bequest & Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent's Death

. Oxford University Press, USA, $23 (208pp) ISBN 978-0-19-509130-4

Interspersing her own story with a detailed study of other memoirs, Miller has put together a book that's part autobiography and part academic treatise. Both elements have their strengths, but Miller's recollections of her parents are more consistently accessible: letters her father had written to his dead wife; her mother's deathbed confession that ""my father was not a satisfactory lover""; her ailing father's reluctant decision to cancel his season tickets to the opera, ""emblem of my parents' life together as a successful middle-class couple in New York."" Such passages add a necessary dose of humanity to what occasionally threatens to turn into an over-the-top analysis of parents, children and death. Reviewing the section of Philip Roth's Patrimony in which Roth contemplates his father's penis while bathing him, Miller writes that ""re-creation of the father (the son's authorial project) retails re-membering him: seeing his father's penis anew, revitalizing its claims to masculinity."" Her academic observations aren't always so convoluted. Indeed, her point that ""we read for what we need to find"" aptly sums up this project: aspiring memoirists, literature students and those simply interested in the story of a childless adult dealing with the death of her parents will find something worth thinking about in these pages. (Nov.)