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Published May 2016
320 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
A fifty-year-old Bridge game provides an unexpected way to cross the generational divide between a daughter and her mother. Betsy Lerner takes us on a powerfully personal literary journey, where we learn a little about Bridge and a lot about life.
After a lifetime defining herself in contrast to her mother's "don't ask, don't tell" generation, Lerner finds herself back in her childhood home, not five miles from the mother she spent decades avoiding. When Roz needs help after surgery, it falls to Betsy to take care of her. She expected a week of tense civility; what she got instead were the Bridge Ladies. Impressed by their loyalty, she saw something her generation lacked. Facebook was great, but it wouldn't deliver a pot roast.
Tentatively at first, Betsy becomes a regular at her mother's Monday Bridge club. Through her friendships with the ladies, she is finally able to face years of misunderstandings and family tragedy, the Bridge table becoming the common ground she and Roz never had.
By turns darkly funny and deeply moving, The Bridge Ladies is the unforgettable story of a hard-won - but never-too-late - bond between mother and daughter.
"Starred Review. This beautifully written, bittersweet story of ladies of a certain age and era will have wide appeal. " - Publishers Weekly
"Nostalgic stories from women who came of age before feminism and how they helped a daughter bond with her mother." - Kirkus
"Through the alchemy of a grand game, Betsy Lerner has woven a universal coming of age story for both mother and daughter. A poignant, humorous and often painful struggle through the pageantry of playing cards; a woman's face on every one." - Patti Smith, author of Just Kids and M Train
"Exquisitely written, in this book are portraits of five women whose like we won't see again. I devoured it in one greedy sitting, and started re-reading as soon as I finished." - Will Schwalbe, author of the New York Times bestseller The End of Your Life Book Club
"Betsy Lerner's ladies are our ladies. In her book, Lerner takes us back to their tables, capturing her own complicated relationship with her mom and a group of wonderful American women with sweetness, humor and sharp perceptiveness. This is a book with heart and feeling." - George Hodgman, author of Bettyville
"This is the best book about mothers and daughters I've read in decades, maybe ever. It's about mother-daughter conflict, the desire to love and be loved, aging and loss, discovery and renewal." - Amy Chua, Yale Law Professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America
"Lerner takes us on a journey of understanding: the card game, the women who play it, their lives and relationships. In Lerner's beautifully observed account, Bridge becomes a pathway - both literal and figurative - to repairing an even more precious bond: her own relationship to her mother." - Deborah Tannen, author of You Just Don't Understand and You're Wearing THAT
This information about The Bridge Ladies was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Betsy Lerner holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. She is the recipient of the Thomas Wolfe Poetry Prize and an Academy of American Poets Poetry Prize, and was selected as one of PEN's Emerging Writers in 1987. She is the author of The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
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