Inheritance and identity

As much as we try to hide it, we carry bits of our parents’ personalities. In this beautiful memoir, Rebecca Wilson tries to figure out who she is while dealing with the murder of her father, labor leader Dow Wilson, when she was 3 and her mother’s losing battle with cancer when Wilson was a teen. “I don’t want to be reminded of how much I might be like her, so I put the picture away,” she writes. In A House With No Roof: After My Father’s Assassination, a Memoir, we are taken from past to present to imagination so fluidly, it feels like we are there for all of it. We are wrapped up in the comfort and solace she finds in her horses and nature. And we are there for her when she finally comes to terms with her identity. This is an honest story about the bond of a family, a bond that sticks through tragedy.