Moving prose, crafted tenderly & treaded carefully with love and honor for someone you 'love' distantly. Remote, but in its own way, love is love. Very personal, touching, it hits right to your heart. I feel warm & emotional despite their on and off bond. Amazing writer, the way she writes the experience & pour it to the pages.

Thank you to Net Galley and publisher for allowing me this eARC in exchange for review.

Cheryl Strayed has delivered an effective and affective short memoir of her own life and her relationship with her now dead mother-in-law over the course of her adulthood as a girlfriend, then a wife, and then a mother to two kids.

Joan, Cheryl's MIL, was a complex character, as she has seen and experienced a lot in her life as a child born of illegal relationship to become a dotting mother to Brian, Cheryl's husband, and being involved in multiple marriages.

The author seamlessly blends the backstory of Joan and her upbringing and relates to the tough and no-nonsensical behaviour of her even after being diagnosed with chronic pulmonary disease at 85, with only a few months before her she gets a farewell from this life.

Being an independent woman all through her life, Joan lives in a senior residential community. However, now that she needs a hospice care, she is heavily dependent on others as her body has weakened and her memory, senile and convoluted.

Even during this tough time, when everyone knew the end is near for Joan, and even she being very much aware of her death, Cheryl reminisces the tough woman once she were, and how both had their views on everything differ, always poles apart, yet agreeing to disagree amicably mostly.

Cheryl, out of her curiosity, even goes on a detective spree to find the father of Joan, which she does through the help of technology, and also finds her stepbrother Bill, about whom Joan's mother Betty never shared any details.

Cheryl also looks back at her own life and her relationship with her mother and her absent father, self-appraising how she has evolved as a woman. She still to this day repents of not being with her mother during her final days, when she died in a hospital alone.

I have never read a memoir so short yet deep and detailed describing the woman who Cheryl and her family had lost.

Everyone knows death is inevitable, but as two women being bonded not out of blood but by mutual respect yet having their own space was very much practical, and tearing for this unknown and undefinable relationship was solidly moving and emotional.

It's been a few years since I read Cheryl Strayed's account of her journey on the Pacific Coast Trail, so I was drawn to this short story describing the complicated relationship the author had with her mother-in-law. I could especially connect to her description of the end-of-life journey having gone through that with both my mother and mother-in-law in recent years.

Cheryl Strayed is probably best known for Wild, the poetic journey across the Pacific coast. Two Women Walk Into A Bar is a story of loss, from the narrator meeting her future mother in law through nursing her through a terminal illness. It’s a meditation on loss and the bond between a Mother and a son and often how the spouse is the excess thread. It’s beautifully written, which I am presuming comes down to the tale being semi-autobiographical. It’s the kind of book you can read in a coffee break (22 pages) and you’ll need another to recover. My thanks go to Amazon Original Stories for a preview.

This is short reflection on the life of Cheryl Strayed’s dying mother-in-law, Joan.

Whilst the relationship with her wasn’t always perfect, and at times could be a little frosty, this memoir pays homage to the complicated woman she was.

A loving mother, she was also a woman haunted by family secrets. Her impending death provided an opportunity for Joan to reflect on her life and reconcile with her past and to find peace in her death.

It was a short and enjoyable read.

Thank you to @netgalley @cherylstrayed for an ARC.

Two Women Walk into a Bar is a short story about Strayed’s relationship with her mother in law. I don’t normally go for short stories but I love Cheryl Strayed’s writing so I decided to read this one and I’m so glad I did!

Her writing is just perfection. She makes you feel part of the story and engrossed quickly. It was such a beautiful story about end of life and coming to terms with that. I definitely connected with it and it reminded me of when my grandmother died.

Thank you Netgalley for the arc!

It’s a small glimpse of the relationship of a mother-in-law with her daughter-in-law. The mother-in-law is about to die and this story revels her past, her relationship with her family, she as a daughter, mother, mother-in-law and a grandmother. It’s a short story but it’s deep and can make one think about some stuff. I loved the bittersweet feeling this book gave me also I just loved the ending ❤️

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and author for this eARC.

A poignant short story about the relationship of two women - a mother in law and daughter in law - as the mother in law approaches death. I couldn't relate to Joan and I didn't really like her either. Saying this though the authors writing is good and engaging and explores their relationship and feelings towards each other. Overall an OK read.

It was my first read by Cheryl Strayed and I'm impressed by her clear and evocative prose, the tenderness she's capable of in talking about such delicate topics as (end of) life, death, and the relationship between a woman and her mother-in-law (which I later learned is the author's true story).

I chose this title because I've been grappling with the death of my father for almost two years. I try to make sense of everything through media, and this book is no exception.

I love how raw her descriptions are—everything is presented as it is, the way she saw things at that moment, both the good and the bad.

This memoir is concise, avoiding unnecessary dragging, and it's filled with small moments. It's actually nice that she even wrote a brief story of her life and the trauma that it brought. I'm sorry that she had a rough life.

Unfortunately, this memoir made me feel nothing. I'm not sad, I'm not feeling sorry, I'm not feeling anything.
Like their matter-of-fact conversations, the story felt just as lifeless. Perhaps it could be heartwarming for some, but it doesn't cut it for me despite both my father and her in-law dying due to complications and old age.

Thanks to NetGalley and publisher for providing me with an eARC to read. Rounded the rating from the 4.5 to 4.

Two Women Walk Into a Bar is the wonderful true story about Cheryl Strayed's lovingly complicated relationship with her mother-in-law. It is the best of the Amazon Original Stories I have read and I have no doubt that it will resonate with other women readers.

I received a drc from the publisher via NetGalley. Many thanks.

Two Women Walk Into A Bar is a short piece by American author, Cheryl Strayed. Waiting tables in a French restaurant at twenty-seven years old, to pay bills while writing her first novel, Cheryl Strayed is waiting to meet Joan, her boyfriend Brian’s mother, who has done the same job: she’s hoping they’ll connect, but she doesn’t make the best impression.

Fast forward twenty years, and eighty-five-year-old Joan, already living in a residential community, has been told her COPD is end-stage and she’ll have to go into high-level care, something to which she is very resistant. Cheryl and Brian manage to talk her around.

Joan preferred to evade “any discussion of what she called “depressing things,” so Cheryl found that “in her presence, I stepped into a force field that quelled my every impulse to dig and say and reveal.” They meet a death doula who helps them understand how things will go.

“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” but Cheryl decides that “In whatever time she had left, I would love her differently, better than I had. Like a daughter would.”

Joan had always been critical of Cheryl, and disappointed in Brian’s career: “Intellectually, I knew her criticisms of my body said more about her than they did about me; I knew they reflected the wider cultural values we’d both been steeped in all our lives that equated thinness with female beauty and, indeed, value. But they cut me to the core anyway” After all, she was married to her only child, the mother of her only grandchildren. But “by the time we sat together sorting through every scrap of clothing she owned, my hurt had long since settled into hilarity and stoicism and the slightest skitter of sympathy” At times blackly funny, but also, incredibly moving.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Amazon Original Stories.

The quickest little read about a tricky relationship between daughter and mother in law. It was heartfelt and relatable.

Thanks to NetGalley for an e-ARC to review.

I really appreciated Strayed’s openness about her relationship with her mother-in-law. The good and the not-so-good that occurs in families is so relatable, even if I don’t have a MIL. I enjoyed the stories and the support she offered throughout the end of her MIL’s life. The strength she showed when she pushed or didn’t for things she wanted to happen and the result being favorable really makes you think about going with your gut when it comes to these things.

Two Women Walk Into a Bar by Cheryl Strayed was a sweet short story that I actually wish had been just a little bit longer. I would love to have known more about the years of relationship between Cheryl and her mother-in-law during the years from first meet to the days at the end of her mother-in-law's life. Holy cow, though! What little you learn about her mother-in-law's familial background was the stuff of novels. That is ripe for a long story on its own! Regardless, I won't spend a ton of time reviewing a story that was 31 pages long, but I really liked it and would love to see Ms. Strayed write more about it whether fictionalized or memoir-style.

Cheryl Strayed could write about paint drying and I’d read it. While brief, it still packed an emotional punch that got me at the last line. A touching portrayal of family and loss.

An essay-length story about grief and loss that was written beautifully and heartbreaking. I've never read anything by Cheryl Strayed, but I am interested in picking up some of her previous work.

This short story pulls you in and made me relate to every day interactions. The complexities of the bitter sweet wonderful journey of aging, paired with the multifactorial relationships of family members who love them. Will make you re evaluate your part of others aging process.

Cheryl Strayed writes a lovely story about the relationship she had with her mother in law and her end of life journey.

A beautiful novella about the family we acquire.. not our blood. This story is about Cheryl’s mother in law nearing end of life and Cheryl’s promise to love her like a daughter. The author talks about the last 20 years with her mother in law starting with the first moment she met her.. wanting to impress her but already started off on the wrong foot. Her husband her only son they knew she loved them.. but did they like them? As a woman about to get remarried and gain my second mother in law who is drastically different than my first it was an interesting and eye opening read.