Lerner Shred Sisters

An intimate and bittersweet debut exploring the sisterhood, mental health, loss and love
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-0-85730-925-9
Verlag: Verve Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister.

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 academia, 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. Perfect for fans of emotional family dramas and quirky contemporary literature such as I'm Sorry You Feel That Way by Rebecca Wait, Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason and Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors.

'A sensitive exploration of loving someone with mental health issues, with characters you'll fall for' - Good Housekeeping

'Lerner is incapable of writing an unnecessary sentence' - Daily Mail

'I love this book. It moves like a souped-up pickup truck' - Patti Smith, author of Just Kids

'A richly layered family novel that manages to be raucously funny, insightful, and tender... I will be thinking about the Shred Sisters for a long time' - Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, author of Good Company

'A brilliantly written, emotionally gripping saga that delves into the complexity of sisterhood, mental health, and resilience... One of the best books I've read in years' - Chloé Cooper Jones, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist

'Shred Sisters is the kind of novel readers won't want to end... Its bright, clean, gallivanting story rewards an open mind and heart with crisp prose, fresh plot turns and dimensional, dishy portraits we can instantly recognize' - Washington Post

'This heartfelt novel reveals the power of the sibling bond to shape our lives' - People

'Modest moments become revelatory in the wry and incisive Shred Sisters' - NPR

'A bildungsroman overcast with the thick and inconstant cloud of mental illness... Decidedly un-trendy, crescendo-less and restrained, this tragicomic family saga is a Bach prelude to the Rachmaninoff of a writer like Jonathan Franzen' - New York Times

** Longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize 2024 **
** A New York Times Notable Book of the Year **
** A Good Housekeeping USA Book Club Pick **
** A Best New Book from Bustle and People **
** Nominated for Readers' Favourite Debut Novel in the 2024 Goodreads Choice Awards **

This novel contains depictions of mental illness and references to addiction.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lerner, Betsy

Leseproben

1

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 told me to call 911 for an ambulance, then soothed Ollie with his deep voice. ‘It’s going to be OK, honey. Stay still.’

Ollie hadn’t moved a millimeter, knowing that doing so would push the shards of glass deeper into her skin. Now in partial shock, she couldn’t speak. Later she joked that she looked like a giant tampon, but just then her wit was on hold. Our mother was away on a bridge cruise through the fjords with her friends. The pamphlet for the trip was on the kitchen counter with all her contact numbers, should we need to reach her. In the long minutes before the ambulance arrived, I suggested we call her. My father vetoed the idea.

‘Let her have her fun.’

The EMS crew arrived, stopping short when they saw her.

‘Whoa,’ the woman EMT said.

‘Shit,’ the guy said, then, ‘Pardon my French.’

The woman slid her hands under Ollie’s armpits while the man cut her shirt off from the back. As usual, Ollie wasn’t wearing a bra, and my father left the room. While the woman held Ollie up, the man plucked glass from her back. She was silent as they lifted her onto the stretcher. The woman covered Ollie’s front with a white sheet. Faintly, then vividly, red slashes soaked through like hash marks. I heard her moan, and they gave her a shot. I started to climb into the ambulance, but the man waved me away and pulled the door closed. Dad started up the car and said I should wait at home, hold down the fort.

I took out the broom and dustpan, the upright kind I used for a game I called Movies. I’d scatter garbage on the floor and sweep it up while complaining with my imaginary ushers about the customers and the sticky floor. The current situation presented more of a challenge. The couch and carpet were covered in shards, shavings, and glass dust. I upgraded to the vacuum. My mother was proud of her new Electrolux cannister; like a dachshund on wheels, the vacuum followed her around as she made her way through the house. It did a good job on the glass dust, but the hose started to buck with the bigger pieces. A puff of black smoke belched from the grid at the back of the vacuum, followed by the smell of burnt plastic.

I called the hospital but couldn’t get through. It was getting dark, and I started to panic. Here I was again, on the sideline of another crisis Ollie created, staged, and starred in. My sister was possibly bleeding to death, while my mother dealt another hand of bridge against a backdrop of majestic fjords. The brochure showed a lavish buffet, a room filled with animated card players, a sunset, and a moonrise. I wanted to call her, but I knew my father was right. Except it wasn’t about letting her have her fun; he knew she would make matters worse.

Dad returned from the hospital later that evening. There was blood on his sleeve. He hugged me hard and said Ollie was going to be fine; the cuts bled a lot, but they were largely superficial. I started to cry, and he hugged me again and told me not to worry. I wanted to lash out: why hadn’t he called? How could he have left me? But I didn’t want him to think that I was more worried about myself than about Ollie. He said he needed sustenance, which meant a trip to Chuck’s Steakhouse, a martini straight up with olives and a porterhouse, rare.

I loved to police the people in line at Chuck’s salad bar, observing how well they adhered to the honor system. When it was my turn, I’d make a show of using the correct tongs to take my fair share from each container, while Ollie would plunge the same tongs into every container, heaping coleslaw on her plate, then olives, and a stockpile of croutons on top. It wasn’t a crime, but it stood for everything I couldn’t stand about her.

The waiter took our order, and my father debriefed me. He said Ollie would stay in the hospital overnight; they had given her some strong stuff for the pain. A plastic surgeon had been called in to assess the damage. Her back was the worst, he said, but the scarring would be minimal. Not a single shard of glass had touched her face.

‘You’re a very pretty girl,’ the surgeon said. ‘You’re lucky.’

When Ollie came home the next day, she let me apply Neosporin on the deeper cuts on her back. I carefully traced each one with a worm of ointment.

‘Can’t you speed it up?’

I was too slow and methodical for Ollie. Even woozy on pain medication, she couldn’t stand waiting for anything.

By the time my mother returned five days later, my father had had the window reglazed and the carpet and couch professionally cleaned. Dad said it looked as good as new. I thought Mom would detect the damage right away, but she was full of bluster and in a generous mood, having won the tournament. She showed off her first-place trophy and handed out presents from the ship’s gift shop. A baseball cap that said ‘Fjords’ for my father and a T-shirt for me that said ‘I ? FJORDS’. The bag appeared to be empty, but then she fished out a polar bear carved from white quartz, small enough to fit in your hand, and gave it to Ollie for her collection of souvenir bears.

The tradition had started before I was born. From the moment Ollie saw them, she fell in love with the bears at the Bronx zoo. She was delighted by the creatures swimming, nosing a big red ball into the air, basking in the sun. She refused to leave the exhibit and my parents could not cajole, bribe, or budge her. The story goes that they stayed watching the bears until the zoo closed. At three, Ollie already knew how to exert her power, and my parents, beguiled by their little girl, acquiesced. ‘Strong-willed’, ‘headstrong’, and ‘stubborn’ didn’t attach themselves to Olivia until later.

Eventually, my mother put the pieces together from the evidence: the banged-up vacuum, the bloody gauze in Ollie’s wastebasket, the bill from the hospital mixed in with the day’s mail. My father downplayed the whole thing, said it was nothing. Years later, after Ollie stopped coming home, he said he blamed himself, he shouldn’t have tried to hide the accident from our mother. Even then, long before Ollie was in real trouble, she was often out of control, playing too hard, not knowing when to quit. The surgeon had said that Ollie was more than lucky; if a single shard had lodged too deeply in her neck, she could have died.

After the meal, Dad ordered dessert, a piece of Chuck’s famous mud cake, with two forks. The waiter set the cake down and winked, ‘Enjoy, you two lovebirds.’ My father lifted a bite to his mouth, but then his body started to shudder. I looked away, afraid of what might happen next; I had never seen my father cry. After a few moments, he shook it off, wiped his face with his handkerchief and apologized for breaking down. It had been a long day.

‘Is Ollie going to be punished?’ I asked.

A mix of disbelief and disgust crossed his face, ‘Is that what’s on your mind?’ Suddenly I was to blame; the girl who sailed through glass remained unscathed – Houdini had escaped without a scratch. My father sank his fork into the cake.

Olivia and I fought as if the world existed to fuel our rivalry. We fought over possession of the big chair in front of the television and the remote control. We fought over the window seat on an airplane and the aisle at the movies. There was no taking turns when it came to sitting in the front seat of the car; as long as I was alive, the younger sister would be relegated to the back seat. Even our mother didn’t contest it. We fought over the dog we didn’t have, what breed it might be, what to name it, which of us it loved most. If Ollie thought that I had a larger portion of food, she’d swap our plates. We fought physically – hair pulling, punching, kicking. Far worse was the name-calling, the insults she leveled at me that still sting today. She called me loser, zero, first living abortion. She said I was a brownnoser, a teacher’s pet, and a kiss-ass. I was boring, cloying, a below-average human. She knew I was an A+ student, but she wasn’t talking about grades. In Ollie’s view I had no charisma, no flair.

My first tormentor, she was ingenious in keeping her tactics beneath my parents’ radar. When we fought, they always said the...