The Rules of Inheritance
Clair Bidwell Smith – The Text Publishing Company
Growing up in the shadow of death is the challenging premise of this affecting, accessible memoir from American writer and grief therapist Claire Bidwell Smith. The Rules of Inheritance follows the author from the age of 14, when both her parents are diagnosed with cancer within weeks of each other. The only child of “older” parents, the pall of mortality hangs over Claire far earlier than any of her friends.
The book jumps back in forth in time from Claire’s parents’ diagnoses to their deaths, to her tumultuous twenties – living life with the realisation that she is no longer anybody’s “special person”. Memoirs give us a justifiable reason to be nosy, to pry into other people’s pain, and to get to know the people in the writer’s life by association.
Claire’s beautiful, loving mother, Sally, whose portrait graces the book’s cover, and her intelligent, gentle father, Gerald, are very present throughout. The story of their relationship, meeting on a blind date, both at ages where they thought they would never again find love, is a relieving distraction from an at-times heavy-going book.
Although the pages dedicated to her parents’ final moments are distressing, it is the torment of the writer herself – the lonely child left behind – that is truly harrowing. Los Angeles-based Claire says she wrote the book to help people who find themselves lost in their own fog of grief.
However, for a book written by a therapist, The Rules of Inheritance is refreshingly free of “therapy speak”, cliché or self-absorption. It’s funny, honest and wise, with the raw truth at its heart. If you can cope with that truth – that in a lifetime everyone experiences loss and will be lost – then this a worthwhile read.
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