In her 2009 memoir, The House on Teacher’s Lane, American writer Rachel Simon mentions that her father was in an orphanage as a child.

The impact of this experience on him was such that when Rachel’s younger sister Beth was diagnosed with an intellectual disability, her parents decided that institutionalisation wasn’t an option.

Even after the parents divorced, Beth continued to live at home – first with her mother and later with her father.

Rachel Simon published Riding the Bus with My Sister in 2002 and it was adapted for film in 2005. The book and film chronicle the year that Rachel spent doing what Beth loves to do, ride buses, after the death of their father who, as an adult, had worked in a community college teaching American history.