‘Mrs. Everything’ details broken dreams in era of women’s lib

Jennifer Weiner has long captured the ups and downs of modern womanhood, starting with her best-selling 2001 debut “Good in Bed.” Her books delve into struggles with careers and relationships, dreams and drudgery, the female obsession with weight and body image, and have always been served with a comfort-food side dish of popular culture.

In “Mrs. Everything” (Atria, 480 pp., ★★★☆), Weiner expands her scope beyond a singular era and woman’s experience to a larger narrative of the lives of two women born in the 1940s into a loving Jewish family. Mom Sarah is tightly wound, adoring of her charming, outgoing and pretty younger daughter, Bethie. She’s stressed by Jo, the messy, athletic, passionate and politically active daughter who knows at an early age that she is a lesbian. Jo’s father acts as a ruffled-feather smoother between his wife and his beloved older daughter.

But Dad dies suddenly when both girls are teens, throwing the family into disarray. Sarah finds a job, Bethie does light housework for her aunt for $10 a week and Jo gets a job as a camp counselor, spending any spare moments secretly making love with her best friend, Lynnette.

If you are a woman who has lived through the past 50 years, this book will make you uneasy, even angry. But maybe that’s the point. Coming of age during the women’s liberation movement, Bethie and Jo take different tracks to fulfillment; one follows traditional expectations for women, and the other runs from them. Both choices prove costly.

The sisters – sympathetic, relatable and sometimes infuriating – experience a host of traumas: molestation by a relative, eating disorders, sexual harassment at work, betrayal by friends and spouses, troubled children, breast cancer and even gang rape. Without a doubt, these wounds are based in reality, but the reader is left wondering: Will these women ever catch a break? Their suffering seems operatic, their joys subdued.

Bethie and Jo are heroines who paved the way for Weiner’s more modern protagonists. By the end of the book, they have made peace with their lives, but Weiner isn’t so sure. The novel ends after Hillary Clinton has lost her bid for the presidency and the #MeToo movement reveals how far women haven’t come. This isn’t my favorite Weiner novel, but perhaps that dissatisfaction is more with the reality of the story she tells.