How Psychiatric Problems Impact a Family
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The book opens with the Shred sisters, Olivia and Amy, young enough to be jumping on the couch, using the thick cushions as a trampoline. This was all Ollie’s idea. Amy only joined in because her sister – four years older – dared her to. Neither girl had planned the end result of the adventure, which was that Ollie crashed through the picture window behind the couch, necessitating a stay in the hospital.
A lot of things happen in this opening scene that are important. Amy’s mom is out of town and her dad feels no need to call her. The dad takes Ollie to the hospital, not worrying at all about leaving Amy behind. Amy comments on her aloneness as it starts to get dark and she starts to panic, “Here I was again, on the sideline of another crisis Ollie created, staged, and starred in.” And finally, when the situation calmed down, Amy joked about having been soaked in blood saying she looked like a giant tampon.
This is all foreshadowing of what is to come. We will see many Ollie antics through the years. We will see parents who do not work together to handle the goings-on in their home. And we will see Amy try to figure out not only her sister’s behavior, but her parents’ as well. Why are they giving all their attention to the trouble-maker and little attention to the well-behaved child, her?
Shred Sisters is a book with nineteen chapters, it only takes until chapter four for Olivia to become hospitalized for the first time in a locked ward for people with psychiatric problems. Somewhere along the line, bipolar disorder is mentioned helping us understand the two sides of Olivia. She is fun, funny, and charismatic until she is wild and out of control.
I felt in the early pages of the book that perhaps I was reading nonfiction, but nope, right on the cover we are told it is a novel. Still, it felt like a report of things actually going on instead of a fictional tale. I wondered if the author had been the neglected child in a household with a sick sibling? I wondered this even more when the author’s acknowledgement at the end lists her “beloved sisters” who gave her “an early thumbs up to publish the book.”
As it turns out lots of things in Betsy Lerner’s early life led her to being able to write so convincingly about this topic. In an interview with Annie Scholl, the author – who is 64 – tells us that she was four when her two-year-old sister died. With no grief groups available to assist the family at that time, the sister’s death became an un-talked-about family secret, which made it toxic. In another part of the interview, she tells us that during graduate school she struggled with profound depression and was hospitalized for six months. And when we read about her memoir from 2003, Food and Loathing, we learn that she had a twenty-year struggle not only with depression but with compulsive eating as well.
Bottom line, Betsy Lerner is well qualified to write about a family struggling with a mental health issue. Knowing this helped me change my overall opinion of the book. I don’t want to give any spoilers about the end result of the Shred family’s struggles with Ollie, but I will say that I thought it was “too.” Whether the ending was too optimistic or too pessimistic, I won’t say. However, after learning more about Betsy Lerner, optimistic and pessimistic are taken out of the conversation. The book is realistic instead.
Realistic fiction. I like it.
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Click here to learn more about Shred Sisters on Amazon.
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