The Breakaway A Novel

         There is this belief that there is a certain age when you are fully “grown up” and you have your life together.  When I was in college I fully believed that finishing college would complete my transformation into adulthood.  We are introduced to Abby who feels like she isn’t as far into adulthood as her friends simply because she hasn’t decided what she wanted to do when she “grew up.” Her friends have solid jobs, she does not.  Abby also struggled with her weight when she was younger, being forced to go to fat camps because her mother seemed to not what a fat daughter.  So, Abby emerges into adulthood with some hefty baggage. 

            Grappling with her feelings for her boyfriend, she finds joy and solace while riding her bicycle.  She’d been a fan of cycling since she was young, and because of that, she ends up leading a bike tour from New York City to Niagra Falls.  When the group introduced themselves, she found herself face to face with a one night stand from a few years earlier.  And her mother…who wasn’t a bike rider at all.  The whole trip was a comedy of errors with a group who started out as strangers and ended up family. 

            There were quite a few themes covered in this book that are things we should be talking about more.  One of the riders was a teenage girl who was pregnant and seeking an abortion in a state where it’s legal.  This book explores the trials women, especially younger ones, have to go through to have access to healthcare and to be able to make decisions about their own bodies.  Which brings us to body-positivity and how frequently women are judge by their weight and appearance more than any of their other attributes.  Abby, somebody who is physically active on a regular basis, spent her life as a larger person, which proves that exercise and diet are not the only two things that determine a person’s body type.  Thankfully, Abby was at peace with her body, she just had a hard time convincing her mother that there was nothing wrong with her.  Or is she really at peace with her body?  She was in a long-term relationship with a really good man, but she wasn’t IN LOVE with him.  She consistently worried about whether or not she would find somebody as good as him because she was a big girl…and she considered that he might be her only option.  Abby might have thought she was fine with her body, but her self-esteem wasn’t as solid as it should have been. 

            Sebastian, her one-night stand, is a serial dater who seems to have gone out with most of the single women in Manhattan.  He was always very clear about his needs and his intentions, feeling like he never did anything wrong towards any of the women he had been with.  However, a group of friends discovered they had all spent the night with him, and he turned internet-famous because of it.  In a world where we, as women, are outspoken against slut-shaming, I feel strongly that we should extend the same courtesy to men.  As women, we complain constantly about the double standard, then this group of women double-standarded Sebastian (yes, I just made that word up).  I feel like as long as Sebastian was clear, he did nothing wrong. 

            We also find ourselves watching the dynamics of mother-daughter relationships play out over the course of this trek.  One daughter tried to keep her situation a secret, but eventually the entire group found out and rallied behind her.  Her mother divulged her own teenage secret, which allowed the two to grow closer to each other through shared experiences.  In this case, the mother tried desperately to steer her daughter in a direction that would, hopefully, have prevented the situation with the pregnancy, but it obviously backfired.  The second daughter, Abby, finally confronted her mother about the fat-shaming she went through as a child, which led her mother to admit her own journey with weight loss.  These two examples highlight the importance of communication between parents and children, which could have prevented a ton of heartache. 

            Weiner did a good job tackling all of these hefty topics without making this book feel weighed down.  Each of the situations fit into the story as a whole pretty seamlessly, nothing feeling forced at all.  It was a thoughtful, well-written novel that I wouldn’t necessarily recommend to everybody, despite having themes that everybody should be talking about. 

I thought this was a beautiful story of women and the lives they choose for themselves. Mothers and daughters, how to support each other and finding what we really need to be happy.