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A young girl learns to cope with loneliness and the loss of her parents. The Rules of Inheritance is an autobiographical account by Claire Bidwell Smith. Summary of the Book When she was fourteen years old, Clare Bidwell Smith discovered that both her parents had been diagnosed with cancer. She began to slowly withdraw from the possibility that by the time she would be thirty, she’d have lost both of them. Even as her mother begins to succumb during her first year of college, Claire tries to find solace in anything that could remotely give her a chance of coping with the tremendous loss, be it boys, alcohol or the vast anonymity of cities such as New York and Los Angeles. In this memoir, she talks about her grief in its five stages. She narrates events in a nonlinear fashion, disclosing how she came to terms with loss and how she continues to shape her life based on those experiences. In raw, powerful words, Claire takes readers alongside her and shows them how pain has the power the shape lives and how one can move past it to become whole. About Claire Bidwell Smith Claire Bidwell Smith is an American writer and grief therapist. A graduate of Antioch University, where she studied clinical psychology, Smith has also written After This.