Review: Riding the Bus with My Sister

I expected to like this book much better than I did. This is the story of Rachel Simon and her developmentally-disabled sister, Beth. Beth spends her days riding city transit buses. In an effort to become closer to her sister Rachel decides to spend time with her, riding the bus. Doing so forces Rachel to come to terms with all of her complicated emotions regarding her sister and the rest of the family. The Simon family certainly has a troubled past. The girls were abandoned by their mother. Really, though, the book is mostly about the adult relationship between the two. And at the end of the day, I didn't find that relationship as interesting as I expected to. Basically, Rachel discovers that having intellectual disabilities didn't prevent her sister from having a full range of feelings and behaviors. A big part of this book seems to be Rachel coming to terms with the fact that it's okay if her relationship with Beth is not all sunshine and rainbows. More interesting was Rachel's effort to come to terms with the philosophy of self-determination, which guides the care of Beth and others like her. Beth is allowed to make her own decisions, even if they aren't very good ones. The ethical issues surrounding this are interesting, even if they aren't the main purpose of this book. And that ended up being the main flaw of the book for me. The issues became more interesting than the people living them.

Rachel Simon, Riding the Bus with My Sisiter: A True Life Journey (Plume, 2003) ISBN: 0452284554 

Review: What to Look for in Winter

Ugh, this book took forever to get through. It sounds like it should be fascinating. McWilliam suffers from a rare condition that produces functional blindness-- her eyes can see but her eyelids are unable to open. This condition arrived in middle age, a particularly cruel affliction for a person who lived her life in the world of books. Sudden blindness is a painful blow for a writer and reader.

I expected this to be a memoir about dealing with blindness, but it really is not. This is a memoir that seems to be simultaneously about everything and nothing at all. McWilliam covers the entirety of her life, and jumps around throughout. The memoir is written in stream-of-consciousness format, and the tone is depressing. Certainly McWilliam has experienced difficult and tragedy. Her mother committed suicide, and McWilliam is a recovering alcoholic. Still, the tone is terribly woeful. I've read plenty of memoirs about horrible things, and this one is particularly depressing. Much of the author's time is spent analyzing her relationships with her ex-husbands.

All of this said, McWilliam is quite a writer. She has some beautiful turns of phrase. Her technical writing ability is quite amazing. But this memoir is completely inaccessible. The writer seems to have little awareness of the benefits she reaped from growing up among the intelligentsia. I love the literary world in which McWilliam lives, but I found this memoir to be dull, slow going.

Candia McWilliam, What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness (Harper, 2012) ISBN: 0062094505