Riding the Bus with My Sister Themes

Riding the Bus with My Sister is Rachel Simon’s memoir about her relationship with her sister Beth, who lives with a developmental disability and devotes her time to riding the buses around her Pennsylvania city. For many years, Rachel and her family viewed Beth’s bus-riding as an eccentric, pointless, and slightly embarrassing hobby—they hoped that she would stop and get an ordinary job. But when Rachel decides to spend a year repeatedly visiting…

Riding the Bus with My Sister centers on Rachel and Beth Simon’s complex, difficult, but ultimately loving relationship. Rachel first visits Beth in the hopes of repairing their broken relationship, which is just one of the many frayed bonds in their family. Rachel and Beth share a complicated and traumatic past, defined most of all by their mother suddenly abandoning them in their early teenage years. This past has also taken a toll on…

Throughout Riding the Bus with My Sister, one of Rachel Simon’s most pervasive frustrations with her sister Beth is that, while Beth fully understands how her behaviors harm herself and others and is fully capable of changing these behaviors, she simply chooses not to. Rachel knows that Beth’s developmental disability makes it difficult for her to change, but she also sees that Beth’s rigidity is just a more extreme version of the universal…