Betsy Lerner

No one will love you or hurt you more than a sister. "I love this book. It moves like a souped-up pickup truck." -- Patti Smith, author of Just Kids and A Book of Days 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, but when her stunning confidence morphs into something erratic and unpredictable, she becomes a hurricane leaving people wrecked in her wake. Put simply, she has no brakes. Younger sister Amy, cautious and studious to the core, survives Ollie's bullying and outcast status throughout her school years. She dreams of winning a Nobel Prize and unlocking the mysteries of the mind. Amy believes in facts, proof, and the empirical world. Except none of that can explain what's happening to Ollie, whose physical beauty and charisma mask the bipolar disorder that will shatter Amy's carefully constructed world. 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. For all that upends and unsettles these sisters, an inextricable bond always draws them back. 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 or hurt you more than a sister.

Shred Sisters

A prize-winning poet, author's agent, and editor offers writers the wisdom and insights she has gained from her experiences, providing inspiration, inside views, and a colorful, anecdotal look at the world of publishing. Reissue.

An Editor's Advice to Writers

The Forest for the Trees

A fifty-year-old Bridge game provides an unexpected way to cross the generational divide between a daughter and her mother. Betsy Lerner takes us on a powerfully personal literary journey, where we learn a little about Bridge and a lot about life. After a lifetime defining herself in contrast to her mother’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” generation, Lerner finds herself back in her childhood home, not five miles from the mother she spent decades avoiding. When Roz needs help after surgery, it falls to Betsy to take care of her. She expected a week of tense civility; what she got instead were the Bridge Ladies. Impressed by their loyalty, she saw something her generation lacked. Facebook was great, but it wouldn’t deliver a pot roast. Tentatively at first, Betsy becomes a regular at her mother’s Monday Bridge club. Through her friendships with the ladies, she is finally able to face years of misunderstandings and family tragedy, the Bridge table becoming the common ground she and Roz never had. By turns darkly funny and deeply moving, The Bridge Ladies is the unforgettable story of a hard-won—but never-too-late—bond between mother and daughter.

A Memoir

The Bridge Ladies

An award-winning poet traces her lifetime struggle with an eating disorder and depression, describing how her size and self-esteem were intertwined, her mercurial experiences with support groups and therapy, her prestigious education, and the family secrets that haunted her recovery. Reprint.

A Life Measured Out in Calories

Food and Loathing

Temple Grandin

"A quarter of a century after her first book, Thinking in Pictures, forever changed how the world understood autism, Temple Grandin-the "anthropologist from Mars," as Oliver Sacks dubbed her-transforms our understanding of the different ways our brains are wired. Visual thinkers constitute a far greater proportion of the population than previously understood, she reveals, and a more varied one, from the purest "object visualizers" like Grandin herself, with their intuitive knack for engineering and problem-solving, to "visual spatials"-the abstract, mathematical thinkers who excel in pattern recognition and systemic thinking. With her genius for demystifying science, Grandin draws on cutting-edge research to take us inside visual thinking and its intuitive affinities for design, innovation, and problem-solving. She also makes us aware of how a world geared to the highly verbal screens out visual thinkers from an early age. Rather than continuing to waste their singular gifts, driving a collective loss in productivity and competitiveness, Grandin proposes new approaches to educating, parenting, employing, and collaborating with visual thinkers. In a highly competitive world, this important book helps us to see, we need every mind on board"--

The Hidden Gifts of People who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions

Visual Thinking

AUTOBIOGRAPHY: GENERAL. For the past fifty years, Monday afternoons in New Haven have always been the same: Roz, Rhoda, Bea, Jackie and Bette. A card table with four folding chairs (and one dummy seat). The old deck of cards in their worn-out cardboard box. A plate of homemade cookies or brownies on the kitchen counter somewhere, largely untouched. And once they begin the game, hours of silence, punctuated only by the sound of cards being plucked up or snapped down into a row along the perimeter of the table. For Betsy Lerner, it was her routine by proxy. As a child, the Bridge Ladies, her mother Roz and her four best friends, were fascinatingly chic, with their frosted hair-dos and shiny nylons, serious about the game in a way that sent her tiptoeing around the corner of the living room. Later, when Betsy was a teenager, the women seemed hopelessly square and out of touch, perfectly content to sit idly as the sexual revolution erupted outside.

Never before Food and Loathing has the intimate relationship between mood swings and food swings been so honestly chronicled. As a bright but chubby girl, Betsy Lerner believed that thinness was the key to success with friends and boys. By junior high, she had precisely divided the world of food into two camps: the dietetic and the forbidden. Becoming a member of the then-fledgling Overeaters Anonymous, she formed a cult-like devotion to the program and lost fifty pounds in a matter of months, only to gain it all back and more. "I am powerless over Hostess cakes," she writes, "and my life has become unmanageable." Her twenties are marked by yo-yo dieting, depressive episodes, and a sadistic shrink who dubs her "the boy who cried wolf." Then, just as Lerner begins to realize her dream of becoming a writer, entering Columbia's prestigious MFA program, she spirals into a suicidal depression and lands at New York State Psychiatric Institute. There, a young doctor helps her take her first steps toward selfhood and unraveling the dual legacy of compulsion and depression. A powerfully rendered story for anyone who has every wielded a fork in despair or calculated her worth on the morning scale.

A Lament

»Als Mitt-Zwanzigerin habe ich einmal meine Mutter gefragt, was ihr lieber wäre: wenn ich heiraten würde oder den Nobelpreis bekäme. Alles, was sie darauf erwidert hat, war: ›Sei doch nicht lächerlich!‹« Mit 54 Jahren verschlägt es die amerikanische Autorin und Literaturagentin Betsy Lerner zurück an den Ort ihrer Kindheit nach New Haven in Connecticut. Hier lebt auch ihre verwitwete 83-jährige Mutter — diese räumliche Nähe birgt für beide Seiten durchaus Konfliktpotential. Aber Betsy will versuchen, eine Brücke zu bauen. Sie beschließt, an den seit über fünfzig Jahren stattfindenden Zusammenkünften der Bridge Ladys teilzunehmen — gepflegten Damen der gehobenen Mittelschicht, die zusammen viel erlebt haben, aber alles gut hinter Perlenketten, pastellfarbigen Twinsets und den Spielkarten zu verbergen wissen. Genau das, wogegen Betsy immer rebelliert hat. Doch nach und nach versteht sie: auch wenn diese Frauen so ganz anders scheinen, was sie über Generationen hinweg im Inneren bewegt, ist dasselbe - Familie, Freunde, Liebe. Und schließlich findet Betsy auch zu ihrer Mutter über das Bridge-Spielen einen völlig neuen Zugang.

Betsy Lerner

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