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Book Reviewed by:No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister.
From Betsy Lerner, celebrated author of The Bridge Ladies, comes a wry and riveting debut novel about family, mental illness, and a hard-won path between two sisters.
It is said that when one person in a family is unstable, the whole family is destabilized. Meet the Shreds. Olivia is the sister in the spotlight until her stunning confidence becomes erratic and unpredictable, a hurricane leaving people wrecked in her wake. Younger sister Amy, cautious and studious to the core, believes in facts, proof, and the empirical world. None of that explains what's happening to Ollie, whose physical beauty and charisma mask the mental illness that will shatter Amy's carefully constructed life.
As Amy comes of age and seeks to find her place—first in academics, then New York publishing, and through a series of troubled relationships—every step brings collisions with Ollie, who slips in and out of the Shred family without warning. Yet for all that threatens their sibling bond, Amy and Ollie cannot escape or deny the inextricable sister knot that binds them.
Spanning two decades, Shred Sisters is an intimate and bittersweet story exploring the fierce complexities of sisterhood, mental health, loss and love. If anything is true it's what Amy learns on her road to self-acceptance: No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister.
Excerpt
Shred Sisters
I was afraid to wake up my dad. He was stretched out on the couch in his den, late afternoon, his brown loafers kicked off on the shag carpet, resting on each other like rabbits.
"This better be good, Amy."
He never used my full name. It was Aim or A, or Acorn, Bun, or Bunny.
By the time he reached Ollie, she was soaked in blood.
Ollie had dared me to jump on the couch with her. Using the thick cushions as a trampoline, she made a swishing sound as she jumped, touching the ceiling and dunking an imaginary basketball. Only when she took a jump shot from the side, not realizing the power in her legs, she crashed into the picture window behind the couch. For a second there was silence, then the window splintered into a web of shards that rained down on my sister. She shook her head, and pieces of glass flung like water from a summer sprinkler. She froze in place, afraid to take a step or move. Tiny spots of blood blossomed from beneath her shirt and pants.
My father ...
Written by Gwyneth Henke for Shred Sisters.
1. Shred Sisters opens with three options for how Amy might begin her narrative: "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." How do you see those three different versions playing out in the novel? Did one interest you more than others? Why?
2. Ollie struggles to feel remorse for her actions, whereas Amy feels a tremendous amount of responsibility for both her own and Ollie's. Is Amy's sense of responsibility for the world around her disproportionate? How do you see that responsibility changing over time, especially as her ...
Sibling jealousy is a primal story — while reading this, I was often reminded of the Prodigal Son parable in the Bible. Everyone will be able to recognize themselves, or someone they know, in Ollie and/or Amy. Although the details of what happens to the Shred family may be foreign to readers, competition and disappointment are universal experiences. At certain points in the midsection, the plot feels like a flat recounting of a series of depressing events. Amy becomes an editor for a publishing company and has a failed "starter marriage"; both her parents grow old and ill. There are deaths and setbacks and, always, Ollie's problems: "She had left a trail of hurt, all in service of her restless, fevered, formidable mind," Amy says. There is inherent repetition to descriptions of mental illness and addiction; Amy, too, sometimes seems trapped in bitterness and self-sabotage. Nonetheless, Lerner has achieved a vivid and emotionally involving family tale peopled by convincing characters...continued
Full Review
(770 words)
(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).
Bill Clegg, author of Did You Ever Have a Family
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. Leah Hager Cohen, author of Strangers and Cousins and To & Fro
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.
Grove Press, the publisher of Betsy Lerner's Shred Sisters, formed in New York City in 1947. Four years later, it was purchased by Barnet Lee "Barney" Rosset, Jr., who took chances by publishing books that were considered edgy: the Beats, modern plays, and sexually explicit literature and works with gay themes that had been banned elsewhere — the likes of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers, D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (see our article about its publication journey), Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and Pauline Réage's The Story of O. He also pushed the envelope by publishing political material, including Che Guevara's and Malcolm X's autobiographical work, and international ...
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