bequeath: essays

What should we do with the things we inherit? In ten intimate essays as vivid as fiction and as varied as music, Melora Wolff’s Bequeath presents a flawed, funny, impressionable narrator who tries to solve the mysteries of bequeathed artifacts, family myths, and haunting mistakes--while also figuring out how to grow up in dangerous, glamorous 1970s New York City.

With a wide range of voices--comic, lyric, collective, personal, joyful, and deeply elegiac--Wolff pays homage to her musician father and family as she roams a past rich with cultural touchstones and indelible characters, from West Side Story and Lost in Space to Leonard Bernstein and Gloria Steinem. Bequeath explores the legacies we impose and bestow on one another.

Melora Wolff’s work has appeared in publications such as Brick, the New York Times, the Normal School, Best American Fantasy, Speculative Nonfiction, and Every Father’s Daughter: Twenty-Four Women Writers Remember Their Fathers, and has received multiple Notable Essay of the Year citations from Best American Essays. She is director of creative writing at Skidmore College.