Author Talk: Betsy Lerner, "Shred Sisters"

Darien Library, along with Essex Library and Hotchkiss Library of Sharon welcomes author, Betsy Lerner, who will delve into her debut novel, Shred Sisters, an intimate and bittersweet story exploring the fierce complexities of sisterhood, mental health, loss and love.

Register for Betsy Lerner, "Shred Sisters"

About the Author

Betsy Lerner is the author of the popular advice book to writers, The Forest for the Trees, and the memoirs Food and Loathing and The Bridge Ladies. She is also the co-author with Temple Grandin of three New York Times bestsellers including Visual Thinking. Betsy received an MFA from Columbia University in Poetry. A publishing professional for more than thirty years, Lerner is a literary agent and partner at Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency in New York. Shred Sisters is her first novel.

About the Book: 

From Betsy Lerner, celebrated author of the memoir, 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 (Ollie) 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. 

Younger sister Amy believes in facts, proof, and the empirical world. 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 more or hurt you more than a sister.