Two Women Walk Into a Bar – A Memoir by Cheryl Strayed

Title: Two Women Walk Into a Bar

Author(s) Name(s): Cheryl Strayed

Published in: January, 2024

Why You Might Like This Book: Read this book if you enjoy

• emotional stories around relationships,
• personal reflections, and
• memories of loved ones.

Who Should Avoid This Book: Avoid this book if you are triggered by or dislike

• death, or
• loss, or
• grief, or
• watching a loved one slowly dying.

Two Women Walk Into a Bar is a short story, a memoir written by Cheryl Strayed, in memory of the relationship she shared with her mother-in-law.

Starting from how Cheryl, the author herself met her then-boyfriend, now-husband Brian’s mother nearly two decades before, we are told how their relationship was. Cheryl was initially excited to meet Joan. A part of her wanted to connect deeply with Joan because she was Brian’s mother but also because she hoped that they might have a lot in common. But not everything turned out the way she had hoped it would.

Joan did not hate Cheryl but did not allow her to get too close either. She had her own unique personality. She had married and divorced five times, and she had only one child, Brian. She was an obsessed buyer of a wide range of clothes and accessories in different styles, and they all looked good on her. She had an unusal way of showing her grandchildren her love, as she had babysat them only twice in all this time. She always tried to stay positive and avoid any negative conversations.

In this personal essay, which runs for only 30 pages, Cheryl walks us through her experience of trying to connect with and understand Joan. Joan never really opened up to her tooo much or asked her questions that would let her get to know her daughter-in-law well. What Cheryl tried to build between them, through addressing relationships they each shared with parents and children, anything like that, Joan would usually avoid and not take forward, except on those occasions where the two would be alone drinking, Joan would drink too much, and she would then start saying things.

There were bitter experiences for Cheryl, too, because not only did Joan not give her the motherly love she expected to get from her but also said hurtful things, like how much weight she had put on when she was pregnant.

But now, Joan is a patient who is diagnosed with end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. After months of visits to the hospital for a lung disease or another such problem, the doctors have finally informed the three – Cheryl, Brian, and Joan – that nothing more could be done from their end, and at best, she would live for several months. Even though this is not surprising, it changes things.

Joan never wanted to live with them and she lived separately all this time, but now, she needs to be moved into the assisted living facility. What to realistically expect and how things unfold in circumstances like this is what this essay sheds light on.

Joan has a lot of things stored with her where she lives, but now that she has to move into the much smaller space at the facility, she has to get rid of many things. The conversations that happen between the son, the mother, and the daughter-in-law in a situation like this make the reader pause and take a breath. Together, they decide what all she would take with her and what all she would give away. Things one owns are a reflection of their personality, they all have some memories. These conversations stir up some emotions and make us question if we should slow down, reflect, and cherish some things more.

Together they go through one by one of Joan’s clothes and accessories – she owned nearly 127 pairs of pants! – to decide what she wants to keep and what she wants to give away, and for each item, Joan just says yes or no. For many of those that she doesn’t want to keep, she suggests that Cheryl should, but Cheryl doesn’t think they would fit her, and Joan insists. In these moments, with the difficult subject that Joan might die anytime in the upcoming months not spoken about hanging in the air between them, what does Cheryl feel? She had lost her own mother a long time back to cancer, and her father, too. For their kids, Joan was always the only grandparent they had known.

The couple connect with many staff members at the assisted care facility. There is Peggy, who is assigned to support Joan and them during this time. And they have the difficult conversation about her death – has it begun yet, her dying, or is death not that close, Brian wants to know becaue while Joan is more tired more frequently these days, she is still what she had always been: the strong Joan. And Peggy tells them the hard truth that Joan is already dying and she is moving towards accepting that her journey of life will end soon.

The essay makes us think of relationships in new ways: we don’t really, fully realize how much we need someone, their presence in our life, how we can’t let go so easily. Even though Brain and Joan are very different as people, the two love each other a lot. Joan had said several times that two women can’t live in one house because that would lead to too many conflicts, which is why she lived away from them, it was her choice. Joan had also said that the love a mother feels for her son is the best form of love, which was somewhat hurtful to Cheryl then, but she accepted that because it really felt true. Even though Joan was never encouraging or even interested in their career plans and goals, she did love them, especially Brian very deeply, and today, the three were in a situation like this.

There is also the story of Joan as a daughter and a sister. A dark past that involves her mother Betty having mad bad choices and poor or forced decisions about her kids Bill and Joan when she herself was way too young to know better. The siblings grew separately and spent all their lives away from each other, as Bill was adopted when he was young, leaving Joan with her mother.

Hard to imagine till you experience something like that yourself, yet realistic is the intimacy you start developing with someone you have known for most of your life when the two of you know that the relationship will soon come to an end and be only a memory from there on because one person won’t be there any more. Cheryl and Brian watch as death slowly starts to consume Joan; she barely eats anything anymore, once an active reader, she can now barely read a page, she can’t walk even with the support of the walker, and she spends most of her time sleeping. Strange hallucinations begin, just as Peggy had informed them that this would all happen. She moves back and forth between having a calm demeanour and literally losing it all. How would it be for Brian to watch his tough mother being eaten by death? As though this is not painful enough, Joan, unlike most other elderly, sick people had a harder transition from ill-health to death. The once confident and independent woman is now a weak, hallucinating, fragile being.

This book is grief portrayed in a gentle way. Even if it is only thirty pages long, even if you can easily read it in one go, you might want to pause now and then; I definitely had to pause. The book is mostly a reflection and recollection of Cheryl’s memories with her mother-in-law in the last phase of her life. Avoid this book if you are not in a position to think or read about death and grief. But a good, reflective read it is if you want to give it a try.