Shred Sisters by memoirist and literary agent Betsy Lerner is an engrossing debut novel about sisterhood, mental illness, family dynamics, and coming into one’s own.
“Here are the ways I could tell this story,” says Amy, the narrator and heroine of the book, in a compact three-part preface.
“Olivia was breathtaking.”
It’s impossible to look away from Amy’s older sister, the alluring Olivia Shred. She is “the woman who continues to dance after the floor clears and the lights go down, listening to music only she can hear.” Gorgeous and athletic, Ollie is the kind of dynamo who ignites every room — only to exit as it implodes. Ollie lies, cheats, steals, and self-destructs, ultimately dropping out of school and spending much of her tumultuous adolescence hospitalized in what her family euphemistically refers to as “The Place.”
Meanwhile, as if to compensate for Ollie’s wildness, Amy devotes herself to a path of perfectionism and obedience. She excels in her classes, enrolls in a prestigious private school, and finishes at the top of her class. Her academic precociousness, however, is offset by intense social anxiety. She longs to be accepted by her mother, who equates conformity with “what the Germans did,” in one of the sole, chilling Jewish allusions in the book.
“For a long time, I was convinced that she was responsible for everything that went wrong.”
As readers of this review may surmise, the nice, secular Shred family from Connecticut is soon torn asunder. Ollie’s larger-than-life presence and recklessness become destabilizing. Amy grows up and makes her way in New York City, swapping an early career in scientific research for one in publishing. As she begins the process of talk therapy and personal growth, she realizes that it would be too simplistic to pin all the drama in her family — infidelity, divorce, financial stress, and emotional insecurity — solely on her older sister.
“No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister.”
Diagnosed with manic depression, Ollie is peripatetic and often at large. Her years are marked by periods of estrangement and intimacy. Whenever Ollie does resurface, visits erupt in chaos or financial ruin. But even when Ollie takes a back seat to Amy’s exploits — this is, after all, Amy’s story to tell — her sisterly presence is palpable, ghost-like.
Lerner’s sharp storytelling places her in the canon of Nora Ephron and Judy Blume. Shred Sisters is an honest, intimate, and heartfelt meditation on the ways our toughest loves shape, break, and rebuild us.
Sara Lippmann is the author of the novel Lech and the story collections Doll Palace (re-released by 7.13 Books) and Jerks (Mason Jar Press.) Her fiction has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her essays have appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, Catapult, The Lit Hub, and elsewhere. With Seth Rogoff, she is co-editing the anthology Smashing the Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible for SUNY Press. She teaches with the Writing Co-Lab and lives with her family in Brooklyn.