The Second Journey: The Road Back to Yourself
by Joan Anderson

The good:

–While not strictly about travel, Anderson’s book uses the metaphor of the journey to good effect in her discussion of midlife women ready to “navigate the rapids of change” in their lives.

–The book is small and fits nicely in your hand (in this world of digitized everything, I like to remind myself of why I love actual books).

–The tone is casual, personal, and the book is a fast read.

–There’s an abundance of good travel and personal growth quotes, like Jean Shinoda Bolen’s: ‘When a woman is at a crossroads, the heroine wants to make her own decision, while the nonheroine wants it made for her.’

The not-so-good:

–The writing often seems formulaic, with the author trying too hard to make insignificant things highly significant. For example, in Chapter 7, “Unfamiliar Territory,” Anderson hires a local fisherman to take her out to the beach that, years before, prompted her to write her best-known book, A Year By the Sea. The fisherman mentions that they’ll have to work with the tides, and that the tide cycle sets his whole week. “How coincidental,” writes Anderson. “His days are controlled by the tide cycles and my thoughts have been about life cycles.” Is it just me, or does this not seem so very coincidental? All of life is about cycles, especially if your work involves nature.

–I often felt excluded from her generalizations about women and their life cycles. She is a white, heterosexual, 60-something woman who has kids and sees her own life in mythic terms. If you are pretty much the same, what she says will speak to you. If not, well, you’ll have to be content with the odd insight that applies to everyone, not just to people like her.

–Another formula that didn’t work for me was her “ten phases of a woman’s life” chart, which she introduces by intoning (I can almost hear Linda Hunt doing the voice-over): Since the beginning of time, women’s lives have been divided into phases…. The since-the-beginning-of-time phases purportedly include:
–Ages 21- 28: Being affirmed by a man—the desire to procreate
–Ages 28-25: Birthing, mothering, caretaking, putting others first
–Ages 25-42: Leaving self out but occasionally looking beyond
There are, of course, millions of women in the world leading lives on schedules very different from what this chart describes. Anderson does her readers a disservice, assuming that we all share the same basic life story. We don’t.

–Some of the book seems like an advertisement for her business of leading women on retreat. Walking the beach in Chapter 8, Anderson reflects on “all the weekend women I have brought out here”– the stutterer who returned from her weekend “bold enough to sing about herself.” The widow and mother of three boys who “released her grief in order to rejoin the human race.” And the anorexic who “buried her scales and stopped measuring her worth by lack of weight.”

For my tastes, these thumbnail case studies claim too much credit, and ring untrue if only because the transformations all supposedly took place within two days. And the hubris of the claims makes me think back on other parts of the book and wonder if they, too, were inflated in some way.