The Rules of Inheritance

October 10, 2011
In this deeply reflective, anguished memoir, L.A. journalist and psychotherapist Smith revisits the staggered death of her two parents from cancer as steps in the process of grieving. Using epigraphs from the seminal work on death and dying from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in naming her sections (e.g., “Denial,” “Bargaining”), Smith moves back and forth in time to explore the intensity of losing her parents, from her mother’s death after a long bout with colon cancer in 1996, just a few weeks into Smith’s freshman year at Howland College, in Vermont, to the death of her father in hospice in 2003, when she was 25. The author fashions her detailed story with an unflinching directness that is both riveting and monotonous, her paragraphs separated by a space as if to allow one to breathe between them. At age 18, she was barely away from the “drama” of her Atlanta home life, where her mother had been in treatment intermittently over four years while her much older father had tried to keep the family together, when painful news of her mother’s death struck: Smith hadn’t made it home that night; she had stayed over with a boy. The guilt and anger propelled her to quit Howland, move to New York, then L.A. with the boyfriend, Colin, recognizing after six years that she wasn’t in love. Smith’s prose possesses a blistering power, rendering this youthful memoir an affecting journey into loss.

November 15, 2011
A young psychotherapist's nonlinear debut memoir describing myriad personal tragedies including the deaths of both parents. Now in her early 30s, Smith lost her mother to cancer during her first year at college, and her father seven years later. An only child, she spent years struggling to come to terms with their deaths while trying to soothe her permanent sense of loneliness. The narrative jumps around in time, intercutting chapters about her teenage years with scenes from her 20s, when she lived first in New York and later in Los Angeles. She also recounts other tragedies, including her abortion and subsequent sadness, a years-long terrifying romantic relationship, her growing dependency on alcohol, her best friend's death from leukemia, her stint working for a myopically selfish magazine editor and traveling on a train in front of which a stranger jumped and died. The material is dark, no question, and some of Smith's revelations are hackneyed ("Grief is like another country"). But her voice is compelling, and the choice to write only in the present tense, even for years long past, works to heighten the scenes' emotional immediacy. Many of the chapters are preceded by lines written by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose studies on the stages of grief have clearly impacted Smith. Ultimately, her memoir bears a strong resemblance to great blog-writing: simultaneously self-indulgent and, at times, surprisingly affecting. Recommended for adults in their teens, 20s and 30s who are interested in stories of loss and the aftermath of a parent's death.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from January 1, 2012
Smith lost both parents to cancer as a young adult. In this searing, devastating, and ultimately cathartic memoir, Smith uses Elisabeth Kbler-Ross' well-known five stages of grief as a narrative framework, beginning with denial, followed by anger, bargaining, depression, and ending with acceptance, as she moves back and forth chronologically in time. It is brutally honest as she becomes overwhelmed by grief and by the state of being parentless. She falls into a depressive funk. A car accident reminds her that she has no one to call when something like this happens. She drinks too much. She finds little reason to exist. Hearing Dave Eggers read from his best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), another memoir of loss, is a turning point in her recovery, as she becomes a volunteer coordinator at the Los Angeles branch of Eggers' 826 Valencia Project, a nonprofit organization that helps children and adults develop writing skills. Today, Smith is a bereavement counselor. By facilitating grief groups, running workshops, and conducting one-on-one counseling sessions, she has come around, as she puts it, to the other side of grief. A powerful, moving memoir of overcoming grief and loss.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)