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Sebastian Ritscher
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THE RULES OF INHERITANCE

Claire Bidwell Smith Clare Bidwell Smith

A Memoir

A resonant memoir of the author's tumultous twenties, which were bookended by the death of each of her parents from cancer, and fogged by a grief that showed no signs of lifting, until she found her way as wife and mother. The story is told in a nonlinear fashion, using the five stages of grief as a window into Clair's experience. The end result is a powerful tale that ties together in unexpected and gratifying ways.
At age fourteen, Claire Bidwell Smith--an only child--learns that both of her parents had cancer. The fear of becoming a family of one before she came of age compels Claire to make a series of fraught choices, set against the glittering backdrop of New York and Los Angeles--and the pall of regret. Claire's mother dies when she is 18 and her father when she is 21.

Alone in the world, she is inconsolable at the revelation that suddenly she is no one's special person. It is only when Claire eventually falls in love, marries, and becomes a mother that she emerges from the fog of grief. Defying a conventional framework, this story is told using the five stages of grief as a window into Claire's experience. As in the very best memoirs, the author's pwoerful and exquisite writing renders personal events into universal experience.

Claire Bidwell Smith is a Los Angeles-based writer and editor. Sche writes for the Huffington Post, The Nervous Breakdown, Blackbook, Yoga Journal, Chicago Public Radio, and the award-winning blog Life in Chicago. She is a licensed psychotherapist with a private practice specializing in grief.
Available products
Book

Published 2012-02-01 by Hudson Street Press

Book

Published 2012-02-01 by Hudson Street Press

Comments

A searingly honest, poignant and poetic chronicle of love and loss, examining what it feels like to be 'nobody's most important person.

Text (ANZ), Saeum (Korean), Arts People/People's Press (Danish), Bruna (Dutch), Intrinsica (Portuguese/Brazil)

Graceful and gritty, and ultimately uplifting. Smith writes gorgeously about the existential tug between life and death that defined her young life. Profoundly personal and exquisitely universal, this story will touch all of us, not just those of us who have faced similar losses.

Jennifer Lawrence to Star In and Produce ‘Rules of Inheritance’.

Written in a fluid, arresting style that grabs the reader and won't let go, The Rules of Inheritance serves as a reminder that we are not only capable of descending to the depths of human experience, but that we can rise back up again. It's a great book.

The clarity of her self-reflection is exquisite and excruciating… Her prose is direct, considered, elegant. She flouts the rules of punctuation but in doing so removes a final barrier between word and reader

In The Rules of Inheritance Claire takes us on a heartbreaking journey into grief's deepest waters and then shows us how she found her way back to hope's shores. With courageous vulnerability and uncompromising authenticity, Smith transforms tragic misfortune into a rite of passage.