Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey [Paperback]

This perceptive, uplifting chronicle shows how much Simon, a creative writing professor at Bryn Mawr College, had to learn from her mentally retarded sister, Beth, about life, love and happiness. Beth lives independently and is in a long-term romantic relationship, but perhaps the most surprising thing about her, certainly to her (mostly) supportive family, is how she spends her days riding buses. Six days a week (the buses don't run on Sundays in her unnamed Pennsylvania city), all day, she cruises around, chatting up her favorite drivers, dispensing advice and holding her ground against those who find her a nuisance. Rachel joined Beth on her rides for a year, a few days every two weeks, in an attempt to mend their distanced relationship and gain some insight into Beth's daily life. She wound up learning a great deal about herself and how narrowly she'd been seeing the world. Beth's community within the transit system is a much stronger network than the one Rachel has in her hectic world, and some of the portraits of drivers and the other people in Beth's life are unforgettable. Rachel juxtaposes this with the story of their childhood, including the dissolution of their parents' marriage and the devastating abandonment by their mother, the effect of which is tied poignantly to the sisters' present relationship. Although she is honest about the frustrations of relating to her stubborn sister, Rachel comes to a new appreciation of her, and it is a pleasure for readers to share in that discovery. Agent, Anne Edelstein. (Aug. 26) Forecast: A blurb from Rosie O'Donnell and an author tour should pique women readers' interest.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Adult/High School-When she received an invitation to her mentally retarded sister's annual Plan of Care review, Simon realized that this was Beth's way of attempting to bring her back into her life. Beth challenged the author to give a year of her life to riding "her" buses with her. Even though Simon didn't know where it would take her, she accepted. During that time, she came to see her sister as a person in her own right with strong feelings about how she wanted to live her life, despite what others thought. Not everyone on the buses, drivers or passengers, liked or even tolerated Beth, and it shamed the author to realize that she sometimes felt the same way about her sibling. As the year passed, Simon came to the realization that "No one can be a good sister all the time. I can only try my best. Just because I am not a saint does not mean that I am a demon." The time together became a year of personal discovery, of acceptance, and of renewed sibling love and closeness. Clear writing and repeated conversations allow readers to hear the voices of both sisters. There is much to mull over, to enjoy, and to savor in this book.
Peggy Bercher, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Because Simon's adult sister, Beth, is mentally retarded, she doesn't spend her days the way most people do. Her life is a stark contrast to that of the author, whose professional responsibilities often consume so much of her time that she has virtually no personal life. While Simon spends her days and nights writing and teaching, Beth makes the best of what her limited opportunities and meager income afford her. She rides the buses all day for the sheer joy of passing through the city and interacting with various drivers and passengers. Simon spent a year riding the buses with Beth and learns about a whole new world and a way of looking at life that is completely foreign to most middle-class people. The experience allows Rachel to forge a new understanding about her sister and her own life. The year spent with Beth prompted Rachel to reexamine their upbringing and ultimately to realize that Beth taught her as much as she taught her sister. Riding the Bus with My Sister is absorbing and honest. June Pulliam
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

"An amazing book...it touched my soul." (Rosie O'Donnell )

"This exquisitely written, powerfully observed memoir deserves an enormous readership." (Dorothy Herrmann, author of Helen Keller: A Life )

"Poignant, honest, and uplifting...I was moved to tears." (Carol Saline, co-author of Sisters and Mothers and Daughters )

"Take this ride-you won't regret it!" (Kathleen Finneran, author of The Tender Land )

"I found myself reading more slowly so that the ride would last longer." (Sophy Burnham, author of A Book of Angels )

"Riding the Bus With My Sister will change the way you look at the world." (Steven M. Eidelman, Executive Director of the Arc of the United States )

"Funny and poignant...This is one bus you won't want to miss." (Don Meyer, Director of The Sibling Support Project ) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

January The Journey "Wake up," my sister Beth says. "We wont make the first bus." At six a.m. on this winter morning, moonlight still bathes her apartment. Shes already dressed: grape-juice-colored T-shirt and pistachio shorts, with a purple Winnie-the-Pooh backpack slung over her shoulder. I struggle awake and into my clothes: black sweater, black leggings. Beth and I, both in our late thirties, were born eleven months apart, but we are different in more than age. She owns a wardrobe of blazingly bright colors and can leap out of bed before dawn. She is also a woman with mental retardation. Ive come here to give Beth her holiday present: Ive come to ride the buses. For six years, she has lived on her own. In her subsidized apartment, a few blocks off the main avenue of a gritty, medium-sized Pennsylvania city, each of her days could easily resemble the next - she has a lot of time, having been laid off from her job busing tables at a fast food restaurant. She has enough money to live on, as a recipient of government assistance for people with disabilities. But Beth also has something else: ingenuity. This trait isnt generally ascribed to people who live on the periphery of societys vision. Like indigent seniors, people with untreated mental illness, and the homeless, Beth is someone many people in the mainstream dont think much about, or even see. Six months after she moved to her fifth-floor apartment, she realized that she was lonely, and had consumed all the episodes of The Price Is Right and All My Children that she could tolerate. So one day she decided to ride the buses. Not just to ride them the way most of us do, and which her aides had trained her to do a few years before. She wasnt interested in something as ordinary as getting from one location to another. She wanted to ride them her way. It was, Beth recalls, October 18, 1993, when, for reasons she cannot remember, she first picked her monthly bus pass off her coffee table. Then she pressed the first-floor button in her high-rise elevator, walked through the vestibule to the street, hailed a bus on the corner, climbed the steps toward the driver, settled into a seat, and looped through the city from dawn to dusk, trying out one run after another, bus to bus to bus. Soon she was riding a dozen a day, some for five minutes, others for hours, befriending drivers and passengers as she wound through the narrow streets of the city and its wreath of rolling hills. Within weeks she could navigate anywhere within a ten-mile radius, and, by studying the shifting constellations of characters and the schedules posted weekly in the bus terminal, she could calculate who would be at precisely which intersection at any moment of any day. She staked out friendships all over the city, weaving her own traveling community. Beths case manager had not suggested this, nor had Regis and Kathie Lee, nor even Beths boyfriend. This idea was hers alone. We hurry down Main St --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.