“Wills are uncanny and electric documents. They lie dormant for years and then spring to life when their author dies, as if death were rain. Their effect on those they enrich is never negligible, and sometimes unexpectedly charged. They thrust living and dead into a final fierce clasp of love or hatred. But they are not written in stone—for all their granite legal language—and they can be bent to subvert the wishes of the writer.” Janet Malcolm, Strangers in Paradise: How Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas got to Heaven.
Malcom’s essay is the kind of trusts-and-estates writing I most enjoy (see here, here, here and here for other great examples). This kind of practice-specific writing’s not loaded with the legal and tax jargon we’re usually drowning in, focusing instead on the lived experience of the families we work with as professionals. And it was in search of this kind of writing that I recently discovered a Substack newsletter entitled The Inheritance Imagination. It’s published by Allison Tait, a law professor who writes about families and inheritance. If your practice includes any estate litigation, you’ll find this newsletter especially engaging.
Here’s an excerpt from a post entitled On Being Disinherited:
Sometimes, the reasons for leaving a child out are sympathetic. One child is doing well financially while another child has acute needs. A child is financially comfortable and the parent wants the money to go to charity. Disinheritance can still, even under such circumstances, bring unexpected grief for the child.
More often than not, however, disinheritance is an act of anger or disappointment, the final act of a parent who wishes to use money and its withholding to make a statement. A parent may disinherit a child because the child went against the parental wishes or failed to act in accordance with family expectations. In some of these cases, an estrangement precedes the disinheritance; and in many of these cases, disinheritance is used as a mode of control while the parent is alive.
And here’s an excerpt from a post entitled Under the Influence:
Stories about wills and inheritance often include stock figures – the greedy young wife, the manipulative caretaker, or the scheming stepparent. Then, once the cast of characters is set, the drama revolves around lawyers being called in, documents being drafted, wills being amended, and new beneficiaries being added while old ones are written out.
Good stuff, highly recommended.