Book Review: "I Was Told It Would Get Easier" by Abbi Waxman

Who knew that a week-long trip to look at colleges would be so full of drama?

There’s an old “Far Side” comic which had a split screen of a man and a woman. The man is thinking about the woman, wondering if she's thinking about him, too. The woman is thinking about ice cream. The caption of the comic is “Same Planet, Different Worlds.”

I thought of that comic a lot while reading Abbi Waxman’s new book, I Was Told It Would Get Easier.

Jessica has worked hard to provide a comfortable life for her daughter, Emily. Sure, working those long hours meant she couldn’t always be there for her daughter, but Emily was able to go to an excellent school and has a great future ahead of her. So what if the live-in nanny raised her a little bit more than Jessica did?

The two participate in a week-long, cross-country tour of colleges. But while Jessica wants Emily to get into a good school, Emily isn’t even sure she wants to go to college, and doesn’t have a clue what she wants from life. Plus she's hiding a secret from her mother, and her mother has something she's not sharing with Emily either.

Of course, this only ratchets up the tensions between them. Emily feels that Jessica only cares about her job; Jessica feels like she’s always walking on eggshells with her daughter. And as they deal with a tight schedule, ultra-competitive parents, and visitors from Jessica’s past, the two will learn a lot about each other—and themselves—on this trip.

This was a sweet book which looked at the always-complicated relationship between mother and daughter (particularly teenage daughters). It alternated narration between the two, so it was interesting to see how differently each perceived what was happening and their interactions. (Hence my thinking about the "Far Side" comic.)

It’s not fun to spend a lot of time with a sullen, unhappy person, so at times Emily’s behavior—however understandable—took a little of the enjoyment out of the book for me. But I love the way Waxman writes, so I kept with it, and in the end, was left with a fun story. (And speaking of Waxman's writings, her last book, The Bookish Life of Nina Hill was excellent!)