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.