The memoir is one of the most
prevalent, and lucrative, forms in contemporary American publishing.  And as
with many genres that are successful, it can sometimes be difficult to separate
the good work from the sensational, the sloppy, and the merely self-indulgent. 
To avoid these pitfalls, careful memoirists will avoid the genre’s worst fault–the
tendency to oversimplify the relationship between the writer and his or her
experience.  Instead, they call that relationship into question, either by
undercutting their narrative authority in various ways and/or by emphasizing
the lack of coherence in the story they have chosen to tell. 

Rachel Simon’s Riding the Bus
with My Sister employs the first of these tactics to skirt the pitfalls
attendant upon both the genre of memoir and her particular subject.  Simon, a
novelist and nonfiction writer who teaches writing at Bryn Mawr, writes about
her complex relationship with her sister, Beth, a mildly retarded woman who
lives in her own apartment, has a long-term boyfriend, and spends her days
riding the buses in her small Pennsylvania city.  The book focuses on one year
during which Simon frequently accompanied Beth on day-long bus rides and, as a
result, became more involved in her sister’s daily life.  Prior to Simon’s
decision to squeeze these bus-riding adventures into her busy schedule, the two
sisters had grown apart, with little to say to one another on their
increasingly rare face-to-face encounters.  The book traces the evolution of
their relationship over the year, without glossing over the difficulties they
face as they attempt to reconnect with one another.  

Disability can elicit
sentimentality of the most pernicious variety–Forrest Gump being just
one example–but Simon’s willingness to confront the strain in her relationship
with Beth shows that she is both intelligent and skillful enough to avoid such
excesses.  She candidly admits that she sometimes found Beth annoying and self-centered,
even as she depicts her burgeoning admiration for her sister’s stubborn
independence and devotion to the community of drivers and fellow riders that
she has created on the buses.  Nor is Simon afraid to address potentially
explosive issues, even when they portray her in an unflattering light.  In one
chapter, she movingly details her family’s decision, years earlier, to convince
Beth to get a tubal ligation, along with the mixture of guilt and relief that
she felt as she accompanied Beth to the operation.  This story comes up in the
context of Beth’s relationship with her longtime boyfriend, Jesse, a
relationship that, as Simon learns, is no different from any other romantic
connection between two fiercely independent yet loving adults.

In this respect, Riding the Bus
with My Sister employs a convention common to the memoir:  it depicts the
education of its subject.  We see Simon gradually learning more about not only
the daily details of Beth’s life–her self-imposed 5 a.m. wakeup time, her familiarity
with the bus drivers’ likes and dislikes, her diet of packaged junk food–but
also about the governmental agencies responsible for helping Beth to make
decisions about her livelihood and living situation.  As the book progresses,
Simon, realizing how little she knows about her sister’s disability, begins to
seek out more information.  She delves into the definition of mental
retardation, the various forms that retardation takes, and the history of the
movement advocating that those with disabilities be given as much control as
possible over their own lives (a philosophy commonly referred to as
self-determination).  

The tendency toward
memoir-as-moral-apothegm has its dangers, particularly when the memoir in question
deals with disability.  Riding the Bus with My Sister does not entirely
avoid the common cultural tendency to interpret the lives of the disabled as
offering lessons for non-disabled people to follow.  Simon’s book is at its
most predictable, and least interesting, when she falls into this pattern, in
which riding the bus with Beth, and watching her sister’s interactions with bus
drivers and other riders, motivated her not only to mend her workaholic ways,
but also to reconnect with an old flame and eventually overcome her fear of romantic
commitment.  Simon’s descriptions of the bus drivers also embody this
weakness:  most of the drivers come across as working-class saints whose
behind-the-wheel homilies remind the middle-class Simon of The Important Things
in Life.  The occasional references to drivers who treat Beth badly, or simply
have little to say to her and Simon, come as something of a relief in the
context of such relentless deification. 

In the end, what saves Simon’s book
from its lapses into sentimentality is her fidelity to the stubborn realities
of Beth’s behavior.  Her insistence on wearing shorts even in winter; her
embrace of wildly clashing colors; her designation of herself as “cool Beth”–these
and other elements of Beth’s character make it impossible for her to remain
confined within any narrative or cultural conventions.  In the end, Beth steals
the show from her sister–and, in so doing, reminds readers that even seemingly
predictable memoirs can undercut the limitations of genre.

© 2004 Erika Nanes