Patty Rhule

Special to USA TODAY

Jennifer Weiner has long captured the ups and downs of modern womanhood, starting with her best-selling 2001 debut novel “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., ★★★ out of four), 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.

Weiner artfully presents two of the warring identities women often embody: rebel and people pleaser. When Jo and her college crush Shelley go to a campus meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to plan civil rights protests, the young man leading the group points “you gals” to the kitchen to whip up dinner. Boiling mad, the women nevertheless dish up a pot of spaghetti.

Jo’s story was inspired by Weiner’s mother, who came out as gay after a long marriage. Jo also grew up before Stonewall, when women who loved other women were shunned. Her steamy love scenes are a beautiful portrayal of a woman discovering her sexuality. But heartbreak and a sense of familial duty rock Jo’s plans for herself. Once determined to travel the world and write, Jo retreats into marriage when the love of her life also chooses what she hopes will be a more secure life.

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.