Shred Sisters Quotes

“It’s hard to separate the person from the illness.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“I’d withdraw or go blank rather than show my feelings, and people assumed I either had no emotions or was snobbish. A girl in my dorm once asked if I thought I was better than everyone else.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“I never viewed my ability to be alone as a strength. It was more of a default.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“We went to the Cloisters in upper Manhattan, and he introduced me to the floor-to-ceiling tapestries known as the Hunt of the Unicorn. The final tapestry depicts the unicorn in captivity, encircled by a wooden fence. It struck me that the fence was too low to imprison the horned creature, but there he remained, bound by his mythical affliction.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“Some people don’t have the knack for being alone” is how she put it. “They’re not strong the way we are.” I never viewed my ability to be alone as a strength. It was more of a default. My mother would never admit that she had had a breakdown in slow motion after the divorce. The few times I suggested she talk to a therapist, she said she’d had enough of therapists and psychiatrists for a lifetime. Mom had chosen the unexamined life and stuck with it to her dying day.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“In the months and years after she died, I often saw the world through her eyes, as if I had inherited her mantle of judgment, her scoreboard in the sky. Those were the times I missed her most.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“TJ’s presentation was titled Empathy Project. It was the most well attended talk at the conference. He described empathy as a black hole in the field of social psychology. Most experiments designed to measure a person’s empathy quotient relied entirely on self-reporting; his study challenged that approach.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“Had I been pushing people away, or was it the other way around?”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“I want to be an adolescent psychologist,” she explained. “So, we’re your guinea pigs,” I said, trying to be funny. “We’re all just figuring stuff out,” she said.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“I’ve never met a rule I didn’t want to break, and this place has a lot of them.” More laughter. “I’ve come to learn that there are better ways of expressing myself.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“Ollie’s phone privileges were eventually reinstated, but we no longer talked every night the way we had. And when we did talk, Ollie was different. Her reports were no longer urgent; sometimes she’d even apologize for being blah or getting off the call before her allotted time was up. It was as if she had run out of gas. My parents reported that Ollie was finally compliant with Dr. Simon’s medication regimen. She took the nightly cocktail he’d prescribed: an antidepressant, an antipsychotic, and a mood stabilizer. My mother, once so adamantly against medication, now agreed that it was the right course. Ollie was a more manageable, acquiescent version of herself. She had a new therapist, a woman, who she said was helping her. She played cards or Sorry with the other patients in the afternoons and shelved books in the hospital library on Sundays. Slowly she earned back her privileges and started studying for a GED.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“Until I climbed those steps to the lighting booth I didn’t really know that I had a crush on Rob. There were girls at Carlson who hiked up their tartan skirts and wore thigh-high stockings. They spent forever in the bathrooms applying eyeliner and smoking. I was still wearing knee socks and a training bra. I never made eye contact with Rob again. From that point on, I carried out my stage-managing duties with grim solemnity, nothing more than a dust mote suspended in a lantern’s high beam.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“Carlson Academy proved to be a positive change. Uniforms were mandatory, so I no longer melted down in front of my closet every morning before school. Getting good grades was a priority; admission to a top-rated college was the universal goal. No one would bully me for raising my hand.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“My mother didn’t believe Ollie was suffering. She always maintained that if Ollie had gone to a detention center after her arrest, she would have straightened out. All this therapy was just a way for privileged kids to avoid legal consequences for their bad actions. Ollie had been caught stealing, and we, her family, were suffering on account of it. Dr. Simon was also a proponent of family systems therapy. He believed that what happened to Ollie happened to all of us. If we wanted her to get better, we also had to examine ourselves. “How dare he!” my mother said. “How dare he pin this on us.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“When my mother’s antique diamond ring from her grandmother disappeared along with the tennis bracelet Ollie had given her, my mother fired our cleaning lady. But the suspicion lingered: would Ollie really have taken the jewelry? My father went to as many pawnshops as he could find in a sixty-mile radius. He came home empty-handed, bereft. He couldn’t shake the image of all that stuff in those stores: wedding bands, retirement watches, cameras, a bugle. He said it broke his heart, imagining people breaking off parts of themselves to survive. He briefly considered buying a pair of bronze baby shoes mounted on bookends. “Imagine having to pawn your child’s baby shoes?” he said. “They’re using the money to buy drugs,” my mother countered. “I wouldn’t shed any tears.” My father’s kindness and even keel had always been my mother’s ballast. Now those same qualities inflamed her. She wanted my father to react, to share her emotion, feel her indignation and frustration. Of course, he was heartbroken that his beautiful daughter was locked away in a loony bin. For as long as he could, my father would rescue Olivia, bail her out, wire her money, take her to a different hospital, bring her home.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“Ollie continued to pace around the table as we unwrapped our sandwiches. I began my ritual of peeling off the bread crust in a single unbroken piece. It was a small but significant pleasure, like peeling the skin of an orange in one go or sharpening a pencil without breaking the ribbon of shavings. Ollie couldn’t stand the slow, painstaking way I approached my beloved projects: spending long afternoons on card houses and jigsaw puzzles, growing a gum-wrapper chain link by link. Her intolerance wasn’t about impatience; her mind just ran faster and more furiously than mine. Sometimes her leg would jackhammer under the table, or she’d crack her knuckles as if releasing excess energy.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“As little kids, we’d race between the rooms; in all of our games, Ollie always cast herself in the dominant role. Only later was I struck by how sadistic it all was: me in the role of Curious George, Ollie as the Man in the Yellow Hat trapping me under the hamper and sitting on it as I wailed to be set free. Ollie played the murderous Bill Sikes from Oliver, chasing me all over the house with a kitchen knife. I’d lock myself in the bathroom, and she’d wave the blade beneath the door. And yet I returned for more.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“As little kids, we’d race between the rooms; in all of our games, Ollie always cast herself in the dominant role. Only later was I struck by how sadistic it all was: me in the role of Curious George, Ollie as the Man in the Yellow Hat trapping me under the hamper and sitting on it as I wailed to be set free.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“They’re making an example of her,” Dad said, pushing his plate away, as if he couldn’t swallow what was happening. “What about getting kicked off the team?” my mother asked, knowing how much Ollie’s expulsion from the team hurt him. “Some good it did them,” he said. The team had dropped to the bottom of the division with Ollie no longer there to carry them. “I hope they’re happy now,” he added. “That’s not the point. What she did was wrong.” “She should have been docked a game is all I’m saying.” “So that’s the lesson in all this? What’s Amy supposed to think? That taking drugs is okay?” she said, invoking me, the silent and seemingly invisible pawn. “It’s marijuana, Lorraine.” “That is a drug!” My mother stood up from the table, chucked her plate into the sink like a frisbee, and charged out of the kitchen. “Please,” he said, grabbing her arm. All I could hear was the sound of the plate wobbling in the sink until it came to a stop. “I guess it’s all okay with you, is that it?” “Honey, it’s not okay, but you could be overreacting.” “She’s flunking out! She’s taking drugs!” “She’s hardly the first kid to try marijuana.” My mother glared at him, then me. “Nice talk,” she said, “in front of the girl.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“I never really learned what my father imagined was going on with Ollie, why he defended her that night, as he did throughout his life. What we all knew but couldn’t quite admit, was that we were afraid of her, and with reason. If challenged, Ollie had two settings: rage and apathy.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“How did you get to be so good?” It was a compliment that felt like an accusation.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“Someone has to reel that girl in.” Ollie had a fender bender within the first months of getting the car; my mother wanted to take away her keys. Dad defended her. “She’s a new driver, she’ll learn.” Even I knew that she kept a stash of pot, rolling papers, and Visine in the glove box. But then she started missing track practice. At first her coach looked the other way and allowed her to compete; the track team needed her to win. But when she showed up at a tournament reeking of pot, some of the parents complained, and the coach had to expel her. He told Dad he had no choice.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“Throughout Ollie’s high school years, my mother’s mantra was “This too shall pass.” But this transgression was permanent, Ollie’s badge of honor for all to see. It was her way of marking herself as separate from us, her first step toward being free. The words etched into her skin came from a New Hampshire license plate: “Live free or die.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“We were silent on the car ride home. Even Dad, always ready with a joke or anecdote to fill an awkward silence, was quiet. We all suspected the bracelet was stolen; that evening marked the beginning of our collective denial.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“Happiness is attainable, sadness is inevitable.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“Mom picked a cookie, cracked it in half, and read the fortune aloud: “Don’t hold on to things that require a tight grip.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“I’d read a book about criminal minds and how the FBI could detect when people were lying. The most common behaviors were fidgeting, grooming gestures, and avoiding eye contact. It claimed that people who tell the truth tend to look you in the eye and relay the facts. Ollie knew all this innately and could fool anyone, get away with anything.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“At first the college students were dubious about letting me join, but once they saw how well I played, they fought over being my partner. That was how I imagined it should be with Ollie, but games with my sister always ended badly. If I took the lead or closed in on a win, she would cheat, change the rules, or walk away, often flipping the game board in her wake, leaving me to pick up the pieces.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters

“The book was How to Win Friends and Influence People; the man on the cover, Dale Carnegie, reminded me of Dr. Mengele, with his close-shorn hair and tight wire-framed glasses. The concept was absurd. Influence people? I couldn’t even get someone to sit with me at lunch. The trust between me and Miss Breen was broken; I saw that she was firmly in my mother’s camp as someone who believed I needed to be fixed.”
― Betsy Lerner, Shred Sisters