A review of Bequeath By Melora Wolff – Compulsive Reader

Reviewed by Lee Rinehart

Bequeath
By Melora Wolff
Louisiana State University Press
September 2024, 180 pages, ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0807182772

The highest, sweetest form of love, perhaps, is when a daughter wishes a parent joy. And the parent will likely never know what the child has seen during the mundane hours of family life. But she is there, watching them. Children pay attention.

Melora Wolff, in her collection of essays Bequeath exhibits a keen sense of metaphor as she weaves stories of her childhood, of explicit girlhood that invited me into the substance of her imagination, a landscape of memory that is perhaps universal for young girls (and likely, their parents) navigating a patriarchal society. What the reader brings to this story is as important as the narrative itself, because Wolff, through skillfully paced and masterful language brings the images that inhabit her memory onto the substrate of the readers own psyche. Reading her is like entering a forest where the quality of light shifts from the stark illumination of a summer meadow to the subtle softness of the understory. She presents a meandering inquiry into her own remembrances, questioning her memory and responding in reflection in a recursive dialogue. It is here, in this dialogue, that the reader is brought in close and can reflect on universal experiences.

Experience is one thing, but the metaphors Wolff conjures invites you to dive in with her, to swim in a maelstrom of emotion and resonance…your own memories emerging from compass points sprinkled into each essay.

Bequeath is a story, told in ten short essays of a young girl coming of age within a patriarchal society: of the shedding of innocence and the recognition of joy. It’s a reflection on how a young girl navigates the implied threat, told in stories of teachers, friends, mothers, and fathers, and of the banal victimization inherent in modern girlhood. Finally, this is a story of a child’s heartbreaking devotion to and selfless championing of her parents, two people bound to cultural dogma.

The first essay brings us into Wolff’s dialogic style as she lays the foundations that ground all the essays; the memory of her father. And in so doing she seems to bring her assumptions about her father’s life under scrutiny. Wolff listens to his voice, watches his movements, and feels his presence, now from her adult perspective. She gives voice to what she felt as a child, waiting for him to come home from work in a world of “seclusion, hiding, shadow, and exile”. Much like the mansion depicted in the second essay, a place that exists outside time, where there is “so much volume in an empty space.” Here, Wolff draws on her memory, seasoned now by experience to conjure similar emotions in the reader.

The rest of the book continues Wolff’s examination of her past to place her experiences in the context of a life lived, juxtaposing her tenure at girl’s school, a disillusioned mother, and the precarious nature of social life for young girls, all seen from the vantage of her love for her father who, though faulty, was likely the most stable influence in her life.

Bequeath is a story of daughters. In the essay “Masters in the Hall”, the schoolgirls feel the weight of their fathers’ collective burden. They intuit the men’s self-consciousness. They imagine their fathers’ dreams placed to one side, chasing them now as family men in a different way, a soft constraint on their masculine autonomy. The men know the day will come when their daughters will be beyond their reach. This gives palpable substance to the melancholy Wolff writes into their actions.

Wolff’s compass points (for example, the tangible, physical elements of her father lifting her in his arms, her “foot catching inside his sweater tearing two buttons away… the “rip of wool” and “the pull and snag” at her shoe’s buckle) took me into my own past when, as a young father, I felt the weight of my sleeping daughter in my arms. Years ago, when I lived with my family in western Washington state, we occupied a two-bedroom apartment on a high bank overlooking the Narrows, where a hidden trail led from the edge of the parking lot through cedars and madronas to a secluded stony beach. Along the path, and under the dappled shade of the conifers were a grove of Himalayan blackberries. Though an invasive species that notoriously crowds the native shrubs, the bushes are prolific berry producers, evidenced by the deep purple stains on my daughter’s chin as she lolled in my arms, sticky fingers on my neck as I carried her home after an afternoon hike. This memory, which emerged organically as I read her thoughts about her father, is what I brought to the essay, though without forethought. Wolff set the stage and invited me into her story, which then became magnified through my own experience.

A fundamental theme throughout the book, set against her father’s tenuous, self-conscious need to provide stability and paternal substance to his daughter, is her mother’s dissociation.  “A poet,” writes Wolff, “disappointed by a prosaic life.” A mother disenchanted with her role gives voice to the tedium after having sacrificed her dreams says, years later in the writer’s imagination:

Could he just take [the girls] so she could have one hour alone to play a record she loved or make a phone call, or even to weep a little in the kitchen over a burnt meatloaf she had yet to master? She was completely exhausted. One hour, or even a little more? Please?

And so, she has released her claim on hope, for its what seems expected of a woman, a middle class mother, in the 1960’s, whereas her father is described as a deeply rooted tree whose branches sway serenely in the gusts that blow the grassy culms of her mother in circles. Society does this to a mother, and in turn buries her maternal panic in the next generation of daughters.

It was her father who kept the stuffed animals. It was he who held them during evening TV shows, gushed over their improvised childhood theatrics. And it was he who inspired his daughter’s imagination, years later in retrospect, in poetic language that characterizes Wolff’s ability to bring beauty to the page:

We run faster and faster, my father with me, and no shade to this lawn that grows quiet and endless as we leave behind us the next minute, the next hour, the next life that approaches so quickly.

Bequeath is a project of probing questions from the past and reifying them in the present through the burden of worry Wolff inherited in girlhood from her mother and felt, but never completely understood, even in adulthood. Her essays are the incarnation of that “delicately durable circuit” established in childhood sending into her “consciousness each day the sanctity of memory.” In communicating her thoughts, Wolff eschews banal soundbites, seeing perhaps the substance of a life can best be understood in the metaphor that invites a shared emotional experience. This is why humans, perhaps, are story tellers, because stories help us remember who we are.

In a final scene Wolff sits with her aged father, her eyes seeking recognition in his. This home, cluttered with the residue of his life but was not merely the place he lived, it was an extension of all he had yearned for when his children were young, when his wife screamed internally for his attention. There is a palpable sadness in the realization of the years that have drifted past as he feels his grown daughter beside him in the space that breaks his heart.

But she is there with him, and if he could only know the impact he has had on his daughter, as evidenced by this memoir, what would he feel? Would he feel the tether again? Would the melancholy dissolve into peace? Is this what death is?

Her father’s last words wore “home, now.” Is this what death is? A coming home? Is this what we are yearning for all through our young lives, the most real, intimate thing we will ever experience?

About the reviewer: Lee Rinehart is an educator and writer whose work examines the disturbing intersection of extractive land use policy and ecological wellbeing. He works at a national nonprofit providing educational programs that assist farmers transitioning to sustainable practices. Lee is an MFA candidate at Wilkes University’s Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing.