Riding the Bus With My Sister (Simon)

Riding the Bus With My Sister
Rachel Simon, 2002
Penguin Group USA
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780452284555


Summary
Rachel Simon's sister Beth is a spirited woman who lives intensely and often joyfully. Beth, who has an intellectual disability, spends her days riding the buses in her Pennsylvania city. The drivers, a lively group, are her mentors; her fellow passengers are her community.

One day, Beth asked Rachel to accompany her on the buses for an entire year. This wise, funny, deeply affecting book is the chronicle of that remarkable time. Rachel, a writer and college teacher whose hyperbusy life camouflaged her emotional isolation, had much to learn in her sister's extraordinary world. These are life lessons from which every reader can profit: how to live in the moment, how to pay attention to what really matters, how to change, how to love—and how to slow down and enjoy the ride.

Elegantly woven throughout the odyssey are riveting memories of terrifying maternal abandonment, fierce sisterly loyalty, and astonishing forgiveness. Rachel Simon brings to light the almost invisible world of developmental disabilities, finds unlikely heroes in everyday life, and, without sentimentality, portrays Beth as the endearing, feisty, independent person she is.

This heartwarming book about the unbreakable bond between two very different sisters takes the reader on an inspirational journey at once unique and universal. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—1959
• Where—Newark, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Bryn Mawr College; M.F.A, Sarah
   Lawrence College
• Awards—several philanthropical (below)
• Currently—lives in Wilmington, Delaware

Rachel Simon is an American author of both fiction and non-fiction. Her six books include the 2011 novel The Story of Beautiful Girl and the 2002 memoir Riding The Bus With My Sister. Her work has been adapted for film, television, radio, and stage.

Simon was born in New Jersey and spent most of her first sixteen years in the New Jersey towns of Newark, Millburn, Irvington, and Succasunna. During that time, she began writing short stories and novels, which she shared widely with friends and teachers but never submitted to editors. When Rachel was eight, her parents split up. She and her three siblings remained with their mother for eight years, and then moved to Easton, Pennsylvania to live with their father, with Rachel also becoming a boarding student at Solebury School in New Hope, PA.

Rachel studied anthropology at Bryn Mawr College and graduated in 1981. She then moved to the Philadelphia area and worked at a variety of jobs, including supervisor of researchers for a television study at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College in 1988.

Just before graduating, she won the Writers At Work short story contest, and when she attended the Writers At Work conference that June in Park City, Utah, she decided to be more courageous than she’d been as a teenager. She brought multiple copies of a collection of short stories, Little Nightmares, Little Dreams, that she’d just completed and handed them to every agent and editor who was interested. An editor from Houghton Mifflin bought the manuscript six weeks later and published it to critical acclaim in 1990.

Career
Until 2011, when The Story of Beautiful Girl was published, Rachel Simon was best known for her memoir, Riding The Bus With My Sister (2002). A national bestseller, it became a seminal book in the disability community and a frequent selection on high school reading lists. It was also adapted for a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie in 2005 and has been rebroadcast frequently on the Hallmark Channel. The film stars Rosie O' Donnell as Rachel’s sister Beth and Andie McDowell as Rachel, and was directed by Anjelica Huston.

The success of the book and adaptation of Riding The Bus With my Sister led to Rachel becoming a widely sought-after speaker around the country. The book has also received numerous awards, including a Secretary Tommy G. Thompson Recognition Award for Contributions to the Field of Disability from the US Department of Health and Human Services; a TASH Image Award for positive portrayals of people with disabilities; and a Media Access Award from California Governor's Committee for Employment of People with Disabilities.

Other adaptations of Rachel Simon’s work include the title story from Little Nightmares, Little Dreams (1990), which has been adapted for both the National Public Radio program Selected Shorts, and the Lifetime program “The Hidden Room.” Another story from that collection, “Paint,” was adapted for the stage by the Arden Theatre Company (Philadelphia).

Rachel’s other titles are the novel The Magic Touch (Viking, 1994), the memoir The House on Teacher's Lane (2010); and an inspirational book for writers, The Writer's Survival Guide (1997). She has received creative writing fellowships from the Delaware Division of the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation.

Personal life
She is married to Hal Dean, an architect whom she met shortly after she graduated from college. Their highly unusual, nineteen-year-long path to marriage, is recounted in The House On Teacher’s Lane. They now live in Wilmington, Delaware. Rachel visits frequently with her sister Beth, whose love of bus riding is chronicled in Riding The Bus With My Sister, and who does still ride the buses. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
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.
Publishers Weekly


(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.
School Library Journal


Family relationships and forgiveness converge in this true-life chronicle by novelist Simon (The Magic Touch, 1994) of a year that gave her better understanding of her mentally retarded sister. Beth Simon has ridden buses for years. Not the way most people do, to get from point A to point B, but "a dozen a day, some for five minutes, others for hours." When hyper-busy, thirtysomething Rachel comes for a visit, Beth asks for a holiday gift: for one year, several times a month, her sister will ride the buses with her. Reluctantly, Rachel agrees. Over the course of the year, she slowly comes to appreciate Beth's ingenuity and stops viewing her solely as a burden. The author gracefully avoids sounding preachy or didactic; she reveals herself to be at times supremely frustrated with her sister's behavior. ("On seventeen buses, over twelve hours, Beth's talk brims with spite about the brutes she encounters. . . . Her babble is unceasing, booming, and unvarying from bus to bus.") The real heroes here are the drivers, who include Beth in family outings, visit her in the hospital, encourage her to try new things, provide her with stability and human connections absent in her highly dysfunctional family. Rachel begins to see that her own life consists of nothing but work; she shut out friends and lovers long ago. This realization, along with Beth's helpful matchmaking ("I wAnt to havE a driver as a BrothEr in law," she writes), leads to a significant relationship. Rachel's reflections on her own life are interspersed with memories of a far-from-ideal childhood: undiagnosed depression exacerbated by Beth's condition toppled their mother, who took up with a violent ex-con after a nasty divorce. The three disparate narratives come together quite well and leave the reader cheering for a reconciliation between the sisters and the rest of the family.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
1. The memoir opens with Beth's annual Plan of Care review, and Beth's request of Rachel to accompany her on bus rides for an entire year. Discuss Rachel and Beth's relationship at the outset of the book: What kind of dynamic do they have? What kind of a role does Rachel play in Beth's life at this point (and vice versa)? What obstacles to their relationship are evident from the first? What do you think was the motivation for Beth's request? Did their tension reflect tensions that you have felt with family members? To whom did you relate to more, Rachel or Beth?

2. Why does Beth love riding the buses? What does she gain from this ad hoc community? Does our understanding of her devotion to the buses deepen over the course of the book, and if so, how does Simon make that happen? Do we come to certain realizations before the character of Rachel does? Examine your own reactions as you read, and when and why they changed. Have you known other people who are devoted to an activity that you do not understand? How did your understanding of Beth's bus riding affect your thoughts about those other people?

3. How do the italicized sections of the book, which relay Rachel and Beth's family history, inform the present-day chapters? Describe the tone of these sections, and the way in which Simon manages to convey their tragic and convoluted past. How does she deal with emotionally charged scenes from the past, and how do they inform our understanding of not only present-day situations and events, but also present-day relationships?

4. Discuss our perspective of Rachel's mother throughout the book: from her panic and despair over the baby Beth's mental disability, to her growing alienation from her children and husband, to her emotional collapse and marriage to "the bad man." How do we view her reunion with her children when they are grown? How does Simon deal with the way each child shifts from anger to forgiveness? At what points do you sympathize with her mother and at what points do you judge her? Discuss the extent to which this is due to the way Simon writes about her mother. How does the story of Rachel's mother shed light on other mothers you might have known who have reached the breaking point with their families?

5. Consider and discuss Rachel and Beth's father: his departure from the family soon after their move to Pennsylvania; his return when their mother kicks Laura, Rachel and Max out of the house; and his tumultuous relationship with Beth, both before and after his remarriage. To what degree do we see him as a sympathetic character? Compare his ability to come to terms with Beth's disability when she was a child with his gradually becoming worn down by their relationship in her adolescence and twenties. Compare and contrast his actions with the actions of their mother. Are there ways in which either is more or less adept than the other? If you know other parents of children with special needs, how do their experiences compare with the experiences of Beth's parents?

6. Examine the relationship between all of the children growing up: Laura, Rachel, Beth and Max. Compare their relationships with each other as children to their relationships with each other as adults. What has changed, and what has remained the same? How supportive of one another were they as children, compared to their lives as adults? How did their dynamic shift over time? What do you think were the direct causes? Would things have been different if the family had stayed together?

7. Discuss the way that Rachel, Laura, and Max were affected by being the siblings of a person with special needs. How much of a role do you think Beth's disability played in their growth as individuals? How did their parents' feelings toward Beth affect the ability of the other siblings to accept her? What are some of the emotions that Rachel reveals she felt about her sister, starting with her being a little child, then a teenager and young adult, and finally a woman entering middle-age? What is the impact of her parents' own difficulties on her sense of her own responsibility toward Beth? Examine Simon's approach to the times when she was not feeling positive about her sister. Discuss the device of the "dark voice." Have you known other siblings of people with disabilities? How do their emotions and concerns mirror those of their parents, and how are they distinct or unique?

8. Discuss Jacob, the Christian bus driver who would have Beth "do unto others as you would have done to you." Consider how we see his role in Beth's life, which goes beyond bus driver to become a true friend (one who takes her to the beach with his family, and cares for her before and after her operation). What kind of a person is Jacob? What makes him likeable, and what keeps him from being an overly sentimental person, or "character," in the book? Compare his role in Beth's life with the friendship he begins to form in Rachel's life. He is clearly on a spiritual journey. Are other characters in the book also on a quest to live a more spiritual life? What is the role of spirituality in the book?

9. Compare and contrast the different bus drivers with one another: Claude, Jacob, Happy Timmy, Rodolpho, Rick, Henry, Estella, Crazy Bailey, Jack, Bert, Cliff and Melanie. Who are your favorites? Which personalities are more vivid than others? What does each contribute to Beth's daily rides? Describe Beth's "falling out" with men such as Claude, Henry, and Cliff. Do we see these men as sympathetic characters or slightly villainous for their lack of patience? Discuss how your perceptions of bus drivers were affected by the characters you "met" over the year. What do their experiences teach us?

10. Now consider Rachel's relationships with the bus drivers. How does her need for their insight and kindness compare to Beth's? How do her relationships with them differ from Beth's, or do they at all? What do you think the bus drivers gain from their friendships with Beth, and subsequently, Rachel (for example, Jacob, Rick or Rodolpho)? How do we see their relationships progress from the opening of the book to its end?

11. Discuss Beth's romantic relationship with Jesse: How would you describe their dynamic? How does their relationship compare with what you know of Sam and Rachel's relationship? Is mental disability portrayed as being a significant factor in Beth and Jesse's compatibility? What did you think of the way Rachel's family handled Beth's burgeoning sexuality, and Beth's annual reminder to Rachel: "Its TEn years since I cant Have a baBy?" Did learning about Beth and Jesse's relationship affect the way you view adults with disabilities? How?

12. What kind of a man is Jesse? What kind of a role does he play in Rachel's life, let alone Beth's? What kind of "character" does he play in the story that unfolds throughout the memoir? Discuss his and Beth's relationship in light of their racial differences, and how they handle their commitment to one another in the face of social opposition. What is the effect on the reader of Jesse riding his bicycle on the periphery of scenes that haven't been about him? What do you think of Jesse's definition of love?

13. Why does Rachel struggle with self-determination? How did it develop in the community at large, and why was Rachel unaware of it until she rode with Beth? What is the role that self-determination plays in Beth's present-day life? Does Rachel's acceptance of it lead her to deal with her sister differently? Compare and contrast the way that Rachel dealt with Beth's "knock-out shot" with the way that Olivia would have dealt with it. What are your feelings about self-determination?

14. Discuss the symbol of the moon. When does it first appear as a symbol, and how does it develop over the course of the book? Examine the symbol of the mountain, which also appears throughout the book. Discuss the use of certain objects or natural phenomena within specific chapters: Beth's bus pass in "The Journey," the airplane in "The Dreamer," the snow in the sterilization section of "Lunch with Jesse," Jack's book in "The Loner," the ocean in "Be Not Afraid," the blue bus in "The Girlfriend," the outdoor candles in "Swans and Witches," and the rainstorm in "Beyond The Limits of the Sky."

15. Is the book enhanced by the inclusion of Beth's letters? How and why? What about Jack's recipes? The references to music?

16. Discuss the various explorations of language that occur throughout the book. What do you think about People First Language? The epithet that Rachel hears her classmates use in school? Did you find yourself questioning your own way of speaking, in the past or present? What is Beth's definition of "cool"? Why does Simon elaborate on Beth's three different meanings for "I don't know"? How does all of this discussion of language expand the larger themes of Beth's struggle for independence and Rachel's struggle to accept Beth?

17. Discuss the ramifications of Rachel's outburst near the culmination of the memoir, where she blurts out "I hate you," in response to Beth's surly, inhospitable demeanor. What does this heat-of-the-moment admission do to both sisters? What kind of change does it invoke in Beth's behavior, and what does it reveal to Rachel about her own feelings? How does it alter their relationship? Why did Simon include it?

18. Compare the annual "Plan of Care" review at the end of the book with the one at the beginning. What kind of progress or change has been made in the way Beth lives her life? What relationships have altered between the people in Beth's apartment? Discuss Rachel's revelations at this meeting and her reaction to Beth's curt "The year's over."

19. Describe the impact of the epilogue to the book, "A Year and a Half Later." What does it demonstrate about Rachel's transformation over the year? What progress has Beth made? How satisfying is this ending, for both the reader and Rachel? What kind of message does Simon leave us with, and how effective is her story as a medium for that message? How did you feel when you finished the final paragraph?
(Questions from the author's website.)

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