Betsy Lerner on Sisterhood

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Betsy Lerner about her novel, Shred Sisters.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: What is interesting to you about sisters and that relationship?

Betsy Lerner: Sisterhood and sibling rivalry has been a centerpiece of my life. I was one of three girls, and we were six, four and two, and the two-year-old died, so then we were the two of us for ten years, when another sister came along. So, I was the baby, the middle the baby.  We had the trauma of the loss of the sister and the rivalry in the way my family split after the death of our baby sister. I became closely aligned with my dad, my older sister, with my mom. Think it’s sort of how we survived. And then everything changed when the little one came along. And I didn’t want to give up my spot as baby, honestly, I was 10 but she was a delight. And I always say our house went from black and white to Technicolor when she was born. She healed us a lot, and I’m just obsessed with sister relationships. My older sister and I didn’t get along for most of our lives. We’ve since reconciled, and that’s amazing, you know in our sixth decade, but sisters are very much on my mind, so I think that it was a natural subject for me, as well as family dynamics. You know, Ollie’s behavior impacted everyone. And I think the book is a lot about that too, about how one sibling’s mental illness impacts everyone in a family. And I’m finding as I talk to people about the book, that’s the thing most people want to talk about, somebody like Ollie, who’s hypomanic. You know she’s bipolar, but she’s mostly in a manic phase. And that person can be very charismatic and very entertaining but also sucks all the energy out of the room, and there’s tremendous imbalance in the family when someone is mentally ill, and most of the resources and attention go to that person, even if it’s negative attention. The ecosystem gets really thrown off, and often for years and years, for a lifetime, especially if a person just doesn’t take to any treatment or can get well.

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Betsy Lerner is the author of the recently released novel, Shred Sisters. She is also the author The Bridge Ladies, The Forest for the Trees and Food and Loathing. With Temple Grandin, she is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns and Abstractions. She received an MFA from Columbia University in Poetry where she was selected as one of PEN’s Emerging Writers. She also received the Tony Godwin Publishing Prize for Editors. After working as an editor for 15 years, she became an agent and is currently a partner with Dunow, Carlson and Lerner Literary Agency.