Bequest and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent's Death

by Nancy K. Miller

"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.

Genres: Memoir

208 pages, Paperback

First published November 14, 1996

About the author

Nancy K. Miller is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, most recently What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past, winner of the Jewish Journal Prize for 2012, and the story of a quest to recreate her family’s lost history. A well-known feminist scholar, Miller has published family memoirs, personal essays, and literary criticism. She is a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she teaches classes in memoir, graphic novel, and women’s studies.

Miller lectures widely, both nationally and internationally, and her work is anthologized in popular volumes on autobiography and collections of feminist essays. She also co-edits the Gender and Culture series at Columbia University Press, which she co-founded in 1983 with the late Carolyn Heilbrun.

After graduating from Barnard College, Miller sailed to Paris to study French literature and complete a master’s degree. Already in love with the city from movies and novels, she hoped to create a new, more sophisticated identity for her twenty-year-old, nice New York-Jewish-girl self. Several years of adventures and misadventures later, including marriage to an American ex-pat, Miller returned to New York minus the husband but ready to reinvent herself as an academic and writer.

Her new book (forthcoming from Seal, Fall 2013) describes that odyssey.