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SHRED SISTERS

Betsy Lerner

First Novel by Betsy Lerner - about two sisters on opposite ends of the spectrum, one bi-polar and one a STEM genius. Against the backdrop of the Shred family's denial and unraveling, it traces the sisters' inextricable bond from childhood through adulthood.

The Shred Family is in denial. Olivia is out of control: stealing, running away, a human hurricane leaving hurt and wrecked people in her wake. Put simply, Ollie has no brakes. Younger sister Amy is a brilliant STEM student who survives bullying and social isolation by immersing herself in science; she believes in facts, proof, and the scientific method. Only none of that can explain what's happening to Ollie, whose physical beauty, athletic prowess, and charisma masks the mental illness that ultimately severs her parents' marriage and leaves Amy more adrift. As Amy dips her toe into adulthood, every step is dogged by Olivia who casts an immense shadow. A starter marriage flames out after a year, an affair with a married man implodes, and her one true friend self-destructs in rehab. But for all that separates them, something always draws them back. Like many sibling relationships, their bond is fraught, fierce, intense, and profound. You can break up with a friend; a sister is forever. Amy's voice is intimate and funny. As she racks up life's disappointments and injustices as only a younger sibling can, we root for her to find some purchase on her life with or without Ollie. The sister knot at the center of Shred Sisters is reminiscent of the ache in Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half. As Betsy writes, no one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister. Author of Forest for the Trees, Food and Loathing, and The Bridge Ladies, SHRED SISTERS will be Betsy's fourth book and first novel. She also co-authored three books with Temple Grandin: the New York Times Bestsellers Calling All Minds and The Outdoor Scientist, and forthcoming Visual Thinking. Betsy received an MFA from Columbia University in Poetry. After working as an editor for fifteen years, she became an agent and is currently a partner with Dunow, Carlson, and Lerner Literary Agency.

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Book Published 2024-10-01 by Grove / Atlantic

Comments

Betsy Lerner's Shred Sisters is a cocktail of raw poetry, needle sharp insights, and propulsive, almost projectile honesty. I can't get over how deftly it pivots from funny to mean to vulnerable to wise, often on a single page. Lerner explores the contours of complicated relationships with an intoxicating ferocity that - we come to realize - amounts to no less than an act of love.

Lerner's skilled approach to narrative lies in subtly depicting the destigmatizing of mental illness and the evolution of treatment during the period from the sisters' childhood in the 1970s through the 1990s . . . A quietly lovely and ultimately hopeful chronicle of a complicated family.

I love this book. It moves like a souped-up pickup truck.

Wise to the woe and wonder of families and the bedeviling forces that shape them, Betsy Lerner's masterful new novel, Shred Sisters, delivers you through grief and devastation toward tremulous, exquisite hope.

The engaging, thoughtful voice established here goes on to unfold the story of Amy's childhood, coming of age, and early adulthood, all profoundly shaped by the wild trajectory of her older sister: a rebel, a runaway, a mental patient, a dropout, a thief, a missing person . . . The story unfolds with the verisimilitude of a memoir: Amy's nuanced relationships with her mother, her father, and her partners are all utterly convincing and relatable . . . [Shred Sisters presents] a seamlessly constructed and absorbing fictional world, full of insight about how families work.

I loved this poignant story of a younger sister growing and forming herself around her older sister's erratic behavior. Betsy Lerner articulates moments I have observed but never put into words, and I both laughed out loud and was deeply moved. A brilliant novel.

longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Read more...

Shred Sisters is a brilliantly written, emotionally gripping saga that delves into the complexity of sisterhood, mental health, and resilience. Spanning decades, this utterly engrossing novel asks readers many profound and pressing questions: Can we fully know the ones we love? Does love always require self-sacrifice? Can we understand ourselves without understanding our family? One of the best books I've read in years.

Deliciously compelling, as poignant as it is funny, and sneakily profound about the myriad ways family shapes and undoes us, Shred Sisters will take over your mind and heart (and life!) until the very last page.

The Shreds are in devastating and hilarious pain. Betsy Lerner has turned her memoirist's eye on a fictional family with candid and surprising results.

Betsy Lerner has created a richly layered family novel that manages to be raucously funny, insightful, and tenderoften on the same page. I'm not sure how she did it, but I gleefully went along for the ride and was bereft when it was over. I will be thinking about the Shred sisters for a long time.

Beautiful, charming, manipulative, and impetuous, Olivia Shred turns epically reckless and downright feral. She leaves Amy, her clutched-up, brainy, and bullied younger sister, bereft and propels the breaks-up of their parents' marriage. In her magnetizing, zippy, painfully and sweetly funny first novel of a family under siege, Lerner has aspiring scientist Amy narrate as she determines that being a workaholic is the only way forward. She clings to reason, structure, and routine, while Ollie swoops into and out of her life, by turns filthy and starving or radiant and mischievous but always seductive and scheming, always in the grip of a bedeviling mental illness. As Amy's grand plan collapses, "man-child" Josh relieves her of many of her inhibitions as she stumbles away from the laboratory and into publishing, forever bracing for her sister's next crisis. The perfectly named Shred sisters' ups and downs are wrenching and felicitous, while Amy is a triumph of clashing emotions, self-sabotage and self-preservation, anguish, loyalty, and love. Aerodynamic prose, psychological acuity, tangy wit, knotty family dynamics, and heady twists and turns make for an exhilarating read.