I liked the structure of this memoir. I read it so long ago and after I read it, I interviewed Claire Bidwell Smith on my show, Writers on Writing. It was a heartfelt story by a daughter who lost her parents way too soon. One of the better memoirs on grief and dealing with grief from a very personal, moving point of view.

I’ve realized that I am enjoying memoirs more and more lately. I can burn through them with a lot of interest. It was no different with the BlogHer Book Club’s latest book, The Rules of Inheritance by Claire Bidwell Smith, which is a memoir of a woman who lost both of her parents by her 20′s.

I really did enjoy this book and found the author’s voice to be so delightful, even though the subject of what she wrote of was very sad. She skips back a forth through the years, and there are times where I was confused about why the story was told that way. Don’t get me wrong, it works. I don’t know if it could have been told in chronological order.

I can’t imagine a life where I was all alone without a family. I honestly can’t. As we all know, I work with my family, we see each other every day. To be in my 20′s and be completely on my own? That blows my mind.

Not recommended. Too long. Poor authorial decisions made about how the material should be organized. Understand, please, that I am not judging the author's grief...nor her entitlement to it. However, I'm not sure that many of the incidents related in the book, particularly the author's troubled relationships with boyfriends, could in fact be attributed to the author's early loss of her mother--which seems to be the implication. The use of the first-person present tense, the omission of quotation marks and speaker tags, and the loading on of play by play description of (what seemed to me)insignificant statements and actions made for very tedious reading at times. A good editor should have assisted Smith with these excesses. A fair bit of the description goes to the author's endless lighting and smoking of cigarettes, which I found stunning in a book where both parents die of cancer. I understand that a fair bit of the material was reworked from the author's blog. I believe that the material should've stayed a blog. Perhaps, however, the memoir will prove helpful to some who are stuck in their grief, but I found little that was compelling or edifying in this text.
Additionally, I'm puzzled by the title, which seems to have nothing to do with with the events related.

Thank you to NetGalley for a digital ARC of this text.