Oh, this book is lovely.
Claire Bidwell Smith’s story of losing her parents to cancer, a few years apart, in her late teens and early 20s is moving and beautiful, infused through its pages with what good, nice, wonderful people they all were. Despite the teenaged Claire’s tattoos and anger that her parents were sick, the book is rich with how much they loved each other. You don’t read much about happy families, you know? And Smith’s was unlikely. Her father was 55, with grown children, two divorces and a second career as a steel magnate when he met her mother, a Manhttan food stylist (years ago, before it was a rom-com staple!) in her late 30s, also twice-divorced, and in her turn convinced she’d never have children. Claire was adored. “Even at eighteen I already know that she poured all her energy into raising me,” she writes of her mother.
And oh, this book is so heartbreaking.
The Rules of Inheritance came out in 2012, and I bought it new in hard-cover but haven’t read it because I know the author. I had a brief, intense friendship with her during the period that the book covers, a friendship that was interrupted by her several moves and her career change. I think I’ve always been afraid of how painful it would be to read. I knew that though the book is a tribute to Smith’s mother and father, it’s also, mostly, about the terrible grief and loss that she lived with during the time I knew her, a shadow-life I never really saw. “Grief is like another country…. It’s a place,” she writes. In her grief, she drank too much and threw herself into bad relationships and lied to her friends and sometimes went home to hide in the footwell of her desk to sob. She had a car accident, and no one to call afterwards. In her own words, she “can’t shake the feeling that there should be someone else here… some adult, someone more qualified and responsible than me, should show up and take over. But there is no one.” She did dangerous, terrible things because in some magical way she imagined they would bring her mother back. She’s articulate and full-hearted and she brings the reader along in her sorrow.
Here’s a beautiful passage:
Finally I realized that twenty-eight was ten years since my mother died.
I realized that when I was eighteen, it wasn’t just my mother who died but a part of me as well. … It was like, without my mother I couldn’t possibly go on. I couldn’t grow up, become a woman, do things that she would never know about, go places she’d never been, think things I couldn’t tell her. So even right now, there is a part of me that refuses to believe that I am the woman I have become. Except every so often I catch a glimpse. I see it in a passing glance in the mirror, hear it in an accidental laugh. … Suddenly there are these two parts of me, then and now, staring back at each other, wondering where the other came from.
The Rules of Inheritance was such a difficult read, but I think it would be a wonderful book to give anyone confronting the death of a loved one. I also read it with interest as a mother because it was so revealing about the teenage daughter’s psychology in a crisis.
Despite Smith’s losses and her painful years dealing with them it’s always obvious to the reader—though not to her at the time—that she will rebuild herself, make a life, survive beautifully. And she does.
An Anthology of Clouds 