In the wake of her mother’s death, eighteen-year-old Claire Bidwell Smith goes traveling in Europe.

Is The Rules of Inheritance about how you inherited a bunch of money and acted like a Kardashian?

Sadly, no. It’s more depressing, gritty and uplifting than that. Both of my parents got cancer when I was fourteen. My mother died when I was eighteen and my father when I was twenty-five. I’m an only child and these losses left me very much alone in the world, and going through something that none of my peers had really experienced. The book is kind of a coming-of-age story. It follows me through cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, through various relationships I cultivated with men and with alcohol. It’s definitely a grief memoir, but it’s also a lot more than that. You don’t have to have lost someone to relate to someone who is trying to figure themselves out and fucking up a lot along the way.

Aren’t you kind of embarrassed to publish a memoir?

For a long time the word memoir really made me cringe. When people asked what I was working on, I would go to great lengths to avoid that word. I’m actually a big fan of memoirs, but there can be something really trite and embarrassing about them, especially given our culture’s obsession with the intimate details of other people’s lives.

Reflections on a grandmother’s grief and the writer’s own as she visits her mother’s future grave site.

A brave and insightful novel about the power and depth of grief, and of the women who struggle with it.

You’re falling in love but your mother is dying at the same time? Sometimes, karma is a really a bitch.

Part 3 of 3 in the Delusional Dog Chronicles, Quenby navigates stress by forcing an unpleasant arrangement upon her spouse.

Amy Winehouse’s tragic passing may have set off a Facebook firestorm, but Laura Bogart goes beyond the “Rehab” jokes and finds an artist of surprising sensitivity and great literary merit.

Greetings, TNB readers and Book Club members! This month’s TNB Book Club selection is Diana Spechler’s second novel, Skinny.

The game of white hats and black hats isn’t good for much but revealing grey areas.