Double Author Event – Griffin Bay Bookstore

Wednesday Evening, April 17, 7:00 Pm

Griffin Bay Bookstore takes special pleasure in hosting bestselling authors Matthew Logelin (Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Loss & Love) and Claire Bidwell Smith (Rules of Inheritance) for a book signing on Wednesday evening, April 17, 7:00 pm. The two are visiting the islands for a writer’s workshop to be held on Orcas Island, and we are excited to have them at Griffin Bay Bookstore to present their books to our reading community.

Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Loss & Love
Matt and Liz Logelin were high school sweethearts. After years of long-distance dating, the pair finally settled together in Los Angeles, and they had it all: a perfect marriage, a gorgeous new home, and a baby girl on the way. Liz’s pregnancy was rocky, but they welcomed Madeline, beautiful and healthy, into the world on March 24, 2008. Just twenty-seven hours later, Liz suffered a pulmonary embolism and died instantly, without ever holding the daughter whose arrival she had so eagerly awaited. Though confronted with devastating grief and the responsibilities of a new and single father, Matt did not surrender to devastation; he chose to keep moving forward– to make a life for Maddy. In this memoir, Matt shares bittersweet and often humorous anecdotes of his courtship and marriage to Liz; of relying on his newborn daughter for the support that she unknowingly provided; and of the extraordinary online community of strangers who have become his friends. In honoring Liz’s legacy, heartache has become solace.

About the author
Born and bred in Minnesota, Matt Logelin was a project manager at Yahoo! until he left the company to focus on writing his memoir and raising his daughter, Madeline. His blog, Matt, Liz, & Madeline has many avid followers. His essays have been featured in the Huffington Post, Glamour Magazine, Mamalode Magazine, and The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything.

Two Kisses for Maddy was the winner of the Goodreads Choice Award in the Best Memoir & Autobiography category, 2011, has been translated to four languages. Matt has been featured on Oprah, the CBS Morning Show, the Rachael Ray Show, CBS 2 News Los Angeles, and KARE 11 News Minneapolis.

Matt is also the founder and president of The Liz Logelin Foundation, a non-profit organization founded in honor of his late wife, with the sole purpose of providing hope for young widowed families (regardless of marital status or sexual orientation) through financial assistance and necessary resources. Since its founding in 2009, The Liz Logelin Foundation has given grants to 120+ families.

Matt and family live in Los Angeles but travel often to see as much of the world as possible.

The Rules of Inheritance
Every once in a while a memoir so striking and beautifully written comes along that people can’t stop talking about it long after they’ve finished it. On a wave of buzz and praise in advance of its hardcover publication, The Rules of Inheritance quickly became beloved as a courageous and honest blueprint for how to start over.

Rules of Inheritance is an absorbing coming-of-age account reminiscent of the works of Cheryl Strayed, Jeanette Walls, and Mary Karr. Author Claire Bidwell Smith—an only child–was just fourteen years old, when both of her parents were diagnosed with cancer within months of each other. “I’ve already come to the conclusion that I will probably be parentless by the time I am thirty,” Claire writes. Hurtling toward loss, her every choice carries the weight of a young woman’s world, and it feels like a solitary place.

Defying a conventional framework, this transportive memoir is told in nonlinear fashion, using Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ seminal five stages of grief as a window into Claire’s experience. The result is a powerful, honest and completely engaging journey that is at once heartbreaking and uplifting. Bookended by her parents’ deaths we follow the author as she quits college, travels to Europe, works at high-profile literary jobs, falls in and out of love with an abusive alcoholic, learns how to drink, and then tries to unlearn how to drink. All the while, she searches for normalcy in a turbulent twenty-something world without an anchor.

Each step brings her closer to finding the meaning of The Rules of Inheritance, and how they will shape her future—as a woman, as a wife, as a mother. As in the very best memoirs, Claire’s resonant writing renders the personal, universal.

“Gorgeously written, compulsively readable, and heartbreakingly true, The Rules of Inheritance is a small masterpiece of honesty. Anyone who’s lost a parent will find themselves in this story. I couldn’t stop reading it, and was sorry when it had to end.” —Hope Edelman, author of Motherless Daughters

About the author
Claire Bidwell Smith lives in Los Angeles. She is a therapist specializing in grief and is well-versed at speaking on the subject of grief from both personal experience and professional expertise.

You can support the San Juan Update by doing business with our loyal advertisers, and by making a one-time contribution or a recurring donation.