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. Wolff reveals the creation of narrative as a transformative endeavor, one that allows us to make peace with the disparate phenomena of everyday experience. For Wolff, recollection is a radical act, a an affirmation of meaning, connection, and community when faced with the disconnected fragments of postmodern experience.
Her book opens with a seemingly simple question: “Who were the fathers?” Here, Wolff expertly frames the book project as expedition, as search, as interrogative process. As the first essay in the collection unfolds, the fathers who “weren’t waiting to escort us beside the East River safely home” become an emblem for the alluringly absent center around which the book orbits. In other words, Wolff prompts us to ask how absence is held in the mind, the body, and the collective imagination. She writes later in the collection, “at night, dreams repair the damage done by living. Lately, I dream I compose an opera in German, that I am a fluent and skilled librettist and composer in a language I have never spoken.” I’m intrigued by Wolff’s depiction of the imagination as a source of infinite possibilities with respect to narrative. For Wolff, it is this ability to forge connections between seemingly distant memories, images, and perceptions that does the hard work of “repair.” Even in the strangest of dreamscapes, storytelling becomes an affirmation of purpose even when meaning, fatefulness, and intentionality aren’t immediately apparent in the narrator’s experience of the world around her.
While highlighting and celebrating the human propensity for narrative, Wolff also raises the question of memory as fiction, as artifice. In other words, if recollection is how we assemble ourselves from the fragments with which we’re presented, where does the boundary between truth and fiction lie? “Were they speculators or witnesses, turning the unbearable facts to fictions they could bear?” she asks. What I most admire about Wolff as a writer is her ability to pose questions while resisting the impulse to offer easy answers. Instead, Wolff continues to refine the question as the collection unfolds. For example, this question of the boundaries between fact and fiction, memory and story, is revisited elsewhere in the book: “That is a very different story, made of someone else’s fictions and facts,” Wolff’s narrator observes, raising the question of critical distance, as it is often easier to analyze, to dissect the other than it is to face oneself.
Melora Wolff’s Bequeath is a brave, bold, and profound meditation on the nature of memory. As Wolff herself writes, “Surely these gifts are passed down to me through the centuries, from woman to woman, out of the open space of memory where my mother wanders and her sister and their mother too, all of them looking for lost selves.” This is an exquisite book by a supremely gifted writer.