Executrix begins with a mystery: Why would the author’s father, from whom she had been estranged for more than a decade, change his will in the weeks before his death to make her the executor of his estate? Executrix charts the process of sorting out the business of this indebted estate using the language of real estate foreclosure, income tax audits, and medical records. The executor transforms the disjointed details of a life into a tidy financial narrative that meets the demands of claimants; the writer transforms the disjointed details of a life into a story that meets the demands of memory. Through this twin accounting, Perham asks the big questions: What are the implications of being the child of an alcoholic? How do we reconcile memories that are fragmented, elided, or nonexistent? And what does it mean to write true “nonfiction”? With surprising humor, real tenderness, and, above all, a daring formal inventiveness, Executrix launches a critical investigation into family stories and secrets, and the genre of memoir itself.
About the Author :
BRITTANY PERHAMis the author of Double Portrait, which received the Barnard Women Poets Prize; The Curiosities; and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative word/art project The Night Could Go in Either Direction. Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction appear in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Poetry Society of America, The San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. Perham’s work has received support from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Hemingway House, the James Merrill House Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program, and Yaddo. She lives in San Francisco.
Review :
Executrix is a moving, wise, innovative memoir that captures the experience of loving and losing a complicated parent with such precision and power it lands like a truth bomb on the heart. In lean and vivid prose that’s at turns comic and devastating, poignant and provocative, the author reckons not only with her late father, but also with memory and the form of memoir itself. Masterfully crafted, Executrix is a complex, emotionally exacting, beautiful book that held me in its thrall from page one.
Brittany Perham’s Executrix is unlike any memoir I have read—gripping, unsettling, and impossible to put down. Perham writes with extraordinary emotional precision about the death of her father, a man whose presence looms over the book with terrifying force. What emerges is not just a story of grief, but of fear, inheritance, memory, and survival. The result is a powerful and deeply compelling memoir that haunts the reader long after the final page.
Brittany Perham’s Executrix is brilliant, a word I do not use lightly; it is an incredibly important book, formally innovative, breathtaking in its shifting insights. It manages to be as hilarious as it is heartbreaking. Beyond being a moving and sharply intelligent meditation on grief and loss and the bonds of family, Executrix is an exploration of memory and truth and narrative-making. It is without question some of the best writing on the writing of memoir that I have ever encountered. Perham’s work dazzles.
[I]t may be impossible to read this book without being changed by it.
