The opening of Betsy Lerner’s debut novel, “Shred Sisters,” is literally explosive: The adolescent narrator’s glamorous older sister has crashed into their living room window, and is covered in glass shards and blood.
For Lerner, the arrival of the novel in her life was nearly as surprising.
“It was like a shadow self that came out,” Lerner said, “like some portal opened. I did not know that I had an imagination.”
Lerner has worked in publishing for decades, as an agent, editor and author of nonfiction. But she never considered writing a novel. “I like the truth. Sometimes I don’t even understand why people write fiction,” she said. “Why not just stick with what’s there?”
Then came the pandemic and long months of lockdown. She and her two sisters started exercising together via FaceTime, a way to keep an eye on each other during a profoundly upsetting time. Sisterly bonds — the tragedies and difficulties Lerner and her siblings had gone through together, along with the realization that “we needed each other, even when we couldn’t stand each other” — were on her mind and filtering into her subconscious.
That crucible unlocked a new creative side. But even when she sat down to write the first sentence of what became “Shred Sisters,” Lerner, 64, had no idea she was embarking on a book project, let alone a novel or a coming-of-age story.
Her beginnings as a writer were in poetry; she received an M.F.A. in the discipline from Columbia, though she “stopped writing poetry the day I graduated.”
That young version of herself never left Lerner, and she calls her novel “a love letter to my 20s and my loneliness in Manhattan.”
“Shred Sisters” is told by Amy Shred, a shy and brilliant young woman growing up in the shadow of her older sister, Ollie. Ollie is gorgeous and charismatic, but can also be manipulative and profoundly erratic — symptoms of a mental illness that upends the lives of everyone in her family.
The novel follows Amy from her teenage years into adulthood, touching on her starter marriage and various romantic entanglements, a career swerve from science to publishing, and perhaps most important, her path to understanding how her family dynamic shaped her.
Ollie shows up at various intervals — she’s mistaken as a homeless woman at Amy’s office in one scene — but usually flees in the end. “‘I want you to be safe,’” Amy tells Ollie, who responds, “‘There’s no such thing.’”
Though the book is strictly a work of fiction, there are parallels with Lerner’s life. “Everyone thinks I’m Amy,” she said. “I’m punctual, I’m dutiful, I’m disciplined. But I’m also Ollie.”
In her depiction of Ollie’s turbulence, Lerner drew on deeply personal experience. Lerner received a bipolar diagnosis and has managed the condition for decades; she’s written about her own struggles and eventual stability in “Food and Loathing,” her 2003 memoir. “I’ve read everything there probably is to read about bipolar illness, from the poets to the neuroscientists,” she said.
As an editor and an agent, Lerner has worked on many memoirs, including “Prozac Nation” and “Autobiography of a Face” — “a lot of very messy people and stories,” she said. “I’m not afraid of them.”
One of the most personally meaningful projects she handled was Patti Smith’s National Book Award-winning memoir, “Just Kids.”
Lerner, a lifelong fan of Smith’s, sent an unsolicited letter to Smith’s lawyer to see if she might like to write a book; Lerner had no idea at the time that Smith had vowed to the pioneering photographer Robert Mapplethorpe on his deathbed that she would write the story of their friendship.
Lerner’s letter was a “godsend,” Smith recalled in a recent interview. When she learned of it, she was reeling in the wake of her husband’s death and struggling to figure out how to support her family. And while she was straining under grief and newfound responsibility, she was “haunted by this book project that no one knew about.”
Though she had a clear idea of what she wanted to convey, “I had never written nonfiction before,” Smith said, and was daunted by the project. The manuscript took years to complete. But Lerner, who had become Smith’s agent, “understood the task, and she helped me to the very last word,” she said, including when Smith’s first publisher dropped the project.
Smith still calls it “our book.”
Lerner is a fierce advocate for the authors she represents, editing manuscripts before they’re sent out to publishers for consideration, and offering emotional ballast.
“She has a lot of understanding and compassion for writers, because she is one,” said Rosemary Mahoney, an author who’s known Lerner for 40 years. “She’s particularly good at helping other people with depression, because she understands it so intimately.”
Over the past year, Lerner has built a following on TikTok, where she’s shared passages from the diaries she kept in her 20s. The entries are lonely, angsty and uncertain — hallmarks of early adulthood that resonate with plenty of younger users who take comfort in her perspective.
“The most profound thing that’s come out of these diaries is finally finding compassion for the girl that I was,” Lerner says in one video.
She first dipped a toe into TikTok because she was curious about what the app might mean for publishing. “After I got past the naked cowboys and kitty cats and all that, I found the BookTok people, and I was blown away,” she said.
“It’s just people loving books. And it’s actually made me love publishing again.”
Rather than feeling vulnerable about sharing intimate experiences of heartbreak and despair on such a public platform, Lerner is grateful to commune with her younger self. “She is with me all the time.”
Writing “Shred Sisters” was particularly poignant at this stage of her life, an opportunity for her to weave elements of people she once knew and loved into fictional compositions, she said. Put simply: “getting to keep them around a little longer.”
But as for her hopes for her readers? “I just want to make people laugh and cry.”
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