To celebrate the launch of Shred Sisters, please join Betsy Lerner and Patti Smith in conversation about their 27-year collaboration including process, writing, memoir, poetry and life. Moderated by Chloé Cooper Jones.

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From Betsy Lerner, celebrated author of The Bridge Ladies, comes a wry and riveting debut novel about family, mental illness, and a hard-won path between two sisters.

"I love this book. It moves like a souped-up pickup truck." —Patti Smith, author of Just Kids and M Train

“Lerner’s skilled approach to narrative lies in subtly depicting the destigmatizing of mental illness and the evolution of treatment during the period from the sisters’ childhood in the 1970s through the 1990s . . . A quietly lovely and ultimately hopeful chronicle of a complicated family.” —Publishers Weekly

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 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. 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. 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.

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Please note: Patti Smith and Chloé Cooper Jones will not sign books on the night.

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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 received an MFA from Columbia University in Poetry where she was selected as one of PEN's Emerging Writers and was the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. She was also awarded and the Tony Godwin Prize for Editors. A publishing professional for more than thirty years, Lerner is a literary agent in New York. Shred Sisters is her first novel.

 

 

 

Patti Smith is the author of the National Book Award winner, Just Kids, as well as Woolgathering, M Train, Year of the Monkey, and A Book of Days. Her seminal album Horses has been hailed as one of the top 100 albums of all time. Her global exhibitions include Strange Messenger, Land 250, Camera Solo, and 18 Stations. In 2005, the French Ministry of Culture awarded Smith the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. Inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, Smith is also the recipient of Sweden’s Polar Prize for significant achievements in music, the 2020 PEN Literary Service Award and The Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest order of merit in 2022.

 

 

Chloé Cooper Jones is a professor, journalist, and the author of the memoir Easy Beauty, which was named a best book of 2022 by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, TIME Magazine, and was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir. She was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Feature Writing in 2020. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient, a Howard Foundation Fellow, and an Associate Professor of Writing at Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

 

 

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