I met her in a bar, my mother -in-law, though she wasn’t my mother-in-law yet. I was twenty-seven and waiting tables in the lounge section of a fancy French restaurant, where she happened to be going for a drink with her girlfriends before they went to a Neil Diamond show. My boyfriend, Brian, had told me to expect her, so I spent the first hour of my shift feeling terribly expectant, my heart lurching with anxiety and anticipation every time another customer walked in.
Two Women Walk into a Bar is a short account of Cheryl Strayed’s challenging relationship with her mother-in-law; brought into focus when Cheryl and her husband, Brian, were informed that his mom had only weeks to live and would need to move into the assisted-living section of her seniors’ complex. Because I had read Strayed before (and particularly Wild), I didn’t need more information than what is in here in order to understand how Strayed’s family background might affect her relationship with the prickly Joan; this felt like a continuing conversation with an old acquaintance. As this is the story of Joan’s end-of-life experience — and the feelings that it stirred up in her daughter-in-law — there is a universality to this narrative that doesn’t require one to have read Strayed before, but taken all together, I found this very affecting. A worthwhile, if short, read. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Over the previous two decades, we’d come to love each other, but it was a particular, conditional sort of love, one based on circumstance and courtesy rather than connection and compatibility. Brian was the fulcrum on which our relationship rested, uncomfortable and unsteady as a playground seesaw. We both loved him, and so we were determined to love each other, a resolve that deepened when Brian and I had children — a girl and a boy who were ten and twelve by the time Joan was dying.
Between Joan informing her daughter-in-law that there is no greater love than that between a mother and son (perhaps especially so with an only child), and Strayed not being able to take up her mother-in-law’s invitation to start calling her “Mom” (so soon after Strayed had tragically lost her own mother), there were plenty of factors that created distance between the pair. Strayed recalls several instances in which Joan had hurt her feelings over the years, admits that Joan would probably have been happier with “a different sort” of daughter-in-law, but in the end, as Strayed sat at her dying mother-in-law’s bedside, they arrived at a sort of understanding:
It had been more than twenty years since she’d walked into that bar and I’d picked her last. She’d been alive in my life for nearly as long as my mother had. She was my family, my ancestor, no matter our distance or difficulties or disappointments, the truth of that finally crackling between us.
It’s a (too common) shame when it takes this kind of circumstance for a frosty relationship to melt, and books like this serve as a good reminder that time is running down for us all. As ever, Strayed writes in a relatable and engaging voice and I am pleased to have read this account.
