Author: Betsy Lerner
New York: Grove Press.
Copyright 2024.
Pages: 272
Price: $ 28.00 (Hardcover)
As an author, Betsy Lerner first burst onto the scene in 2000 with the nonfiction The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers which sent seismic shock waves of brutal honesty and savage humor emanating across the publishing world. At the end of my first decade as a struggling author, she shed light on why I was so bad; it was life-changing for me. She had been an editor at Simon & Schuster for 15 years before becoming a literary agent by joining Dunow, Carlson, and Lerner Literary Agency in 2005. As such, she intimately knows all ends of the publishing industry: author/agent/editor. At age 67, Shred Sisters is her first foray into fiction. Lerner openly states that this book is deeply personal, and it certainly reads as a confessional narrative. When mental illness afflicts one member of a family, through the inevitable collateral damage, all members of the family are affected. At its beating heart, this is a book about perseverance, acceptance, and most of all, forgiveness.
Lerner sets the stage very early on in the front matter forgoing the usual dedication and/or epigram with a literary forewarning stating:
Here are the ways I could start this story:
Olivia was breathtaking.
For a long time, I was convinced that she was responsible for everything that went wrong.
No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister.
These lines eventually weave their way into the narrative giving the reader ample explanation as to why the younger sister Amy, as the viewpoint character, feels this way. As the older sister by only a few short years, Olivia turned bullying and being the center of attention into an art form. Early on Amy laments:
My first tormentor, she was ingenious in keeping her tactics beneath my parents’ radar. When we fought, they always said the same thing: they didn’t care who started it, we should sort it out ourselves. What was there to sort out after Ollie had eaten my dessert, left my beloved markers open to dry, and beheaded my dolls? Every year on my birthday, Ollie would push me aside and blow out the candles. My parents would chide her as they laughed –“Ollie!!!”My father would relight the candles, but I would refuse to blow them out or make a wish as the little wax columns melted into the cake. They would tell me to stop being silly, and I was branded the bad sport while Ollie pushed me aside and stole my wish (p.8-9).
The primary thread that underlies this story is that life is most usually easier for the beautiful and/or athletically gifted, and Olivia was both. They can get away with more inconsiderate and selfish behavior than the rest of us, and it’s entirely understandable that the less beautiful will resent that very fact. Thus the defining theme of Amy’s adolescent and early adult years.
It’s obvious that Olivia is her parents’ favorite, particularly her father’s. She abuses that privilege with impunity breaking his heart time and time again, and stretching her mother to the breaking point.
My parents split apart slowly, like the subterranean forces that pulled apart the jagged coasts of South America and Africa. You could say that Ollie was the force that drove them apart. My mother declared that Ollie, now skipping school on an almost regular basis, was too much to handle, the skunky smell of marijuana trailing her through the house. Mom would beg our father for help, but he would downplay Ollie’s behavior, believing it was a phase that she would grow out of like a pair of shoes (p. 29).
He was wrong, as co-dependents always are, and the rest of the world started to agree with Mom’s viewpoint. Ollie gets dropped from the swimming and track teams even though she is obviously the star of both. Acquiring her car at 16, she shortly thereafter smashes it up. Ever-escalating inconsiderate and irresponsible behavior become commonplace occurrences. She sneaks out, runs with the wrong crowd, enthusiastically partakes in the obligatory alcohol and drugs, gets suspended from school, and assumes the martyr syndrome of the perpetually oppressed while becoming the living embodiment of the rebel without a cause. If they can’t readily find one, they’ll soon create one. Through the sister’s teen and early adult years, there’s no shortage of drama. Ollie engages in shoplifting and becomes enamored with an endless succession of undesirable boyfriends. Predictably, she becomes stuck in the revolving door of therapists and climbs up on the treadmill of mood-altering medications, but neither ever seems to work for very long.
By their late twenties Olivia is adrift, Amy is resentful, and their parents are at wit’s end. As far as Amy is concerned, the final straw comes Ollie convinces her parents to invest in a bakery renovation and then makes off with her father’s $70,000 seed money investment leaving her mother to extinguish the fire by cancelling permits, insurance, scheduled inspections, and slashing prices to sell off equipment and furniture that could not be returned. The only question that remained was where Olivia ran off to?
“She’s in California.”I could hear the hope in Dad’s voice. It had been almost a year since Ollie had fled New Haven, the bakery scheme, and Mom. She was living in LA with a movie producer (p. 133).
Dad gets a reluctant Amy to go visit her, and Olivia appears to have succumbed to the seductive charm of Hollywood’s bucolic weather, fast cars, and laid-back lifestyle. Ollie’s movie producer boyfriend is unconditionally in love with her despite whether or not he knows that she previously worked in the world’s oldest profession when she first hit town. She appears to have it all now, or at least a solid footing in life, but for the mentally challenged that footing always seems to be built on top of quicksand, and Olivia falls into a recurrent pattern of disappearances – sometimes for weeks, and oftentimes for months on end, yet her boyfriend functions as the dependable touchstone that always takes her back.
Amy’s life moves on and her resentment towards Olivia mellows as her ugly duckling persona melts away when she recognizes that she has become the swan well positioned by education and intellect and a deeply-ingrained understanding of how not to behave to succeed at the game of life. It never hurts to be physically attractive, and she gradually accepts that she wasn’t short-changed in the looks department if only she could stop comparing herself to Olivia. She muddles through sexual partners, affairs, and a divorce; all the usual roadblocks for anyone seeking the ever-elusive true love. Her sibling rivalry with her wayward sister becomes nothing more than the white noise of her life that’s always somewhere in the background but never again important enough to demand center stage.
They say that time is the healer, and thankfully for both sisters, time insatiably marched on through the death of their father and their mother’s acquisition of a new “man-friend” before arriving at the inevitable visit to hospice and a final appearance at the funeral home.
Luckily for Ollie, the birth of her daughter Raine finally breaks through the wall of dysfunction in her life that phycologist now recognise as Bipolar 1. Accepting that she will have to embrace a lifelong regimen of medication no longer seems so demeaning or daunting if that’s what allows her to experience the joys of motherhood. Amy is named Raine’s guardian, and both sisters dote on the child to the point of planning an extravagant second birthday party for her even while knowing deep down that all children’s birthday parties reveal more about the parents than the child. Preparing goodie bags outside on Olivia’s terrace the night before the party primary thrust of the story is revealed:
The pool pump clicked off amplifying the silence between us.
“I love you, little sister. I hope you know that.”
When I failed to respond in kind Ollie returned to her assembly line, filling the last of the goody bags.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I know you love me too (p. 258).”
Betsy Learner’s considerable literary talents are on full display with this work. As a book editor and literary agent she has a keen understanding of what motivates readers because she has done so much reading herself, but beyond that, what separates Shred Sisters from the usual “love conquers all” melodramatic fare is Lerner’s seemingly instinctual understanding of the raw baseness inhuman nature, and the pure vein of ugliness inherent in envy. Amy is fortunate indeed to be released from it. We all breathe a massive sigh of relief at the story’s resolution, and that’s the triumph of this exceptional book.
