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The Bridge Ladies: A Memoir, by Betsy Lerner
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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.
- Sales Rank: #2620 in eBooks
- Published on: 2016-05-03
- Released on: 2016-05-03
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
“Lerner’s memoir makes a case for spending time together under the rules of neutrality imposed by a game, and approach to living that refrains from over-sharing and outward complaining to concentrate on the task at hand. The bridge ladies are there for one another, even as they keep their feelings to themselves and play on.” (New York Times Book Review)
“A heartfelt and affecting memoir.” (Washington Post)
“A smart and colorful memoir.” (Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air)
“A deeply affecting memoir...a generous and honest examination, she honors these women’s lives” (Boston Globe)
“In her absorbing memoir, Lerner probes marriage, career, motherhood, depression, aging, death, religion and sex, discovering that, although the Bridge Ladies’ generation differs from hers, they share common values of love and kinship. This beautifully written, bittersweet story of ladies of a certain age and era will have wide appeal.” (Publishers Weekly (starred review))
“A book for two generations.” (Dallas Morning News)
“The Bridge Ladies is an uplifting account of a baby boomer’s attempt to understand her mother’s generation. Lerner never lets herself off the hook, either, and the result is candid, fresh and enlightening.” (Providence Journal)
“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)
“Betsy Lerner’s ladies are our ladies, our mothers, grandmothers, and aunts. Lerner takes us back to their tables, capturing a group of wonderful American women—growing older now and braving new battles—with sweetness, humor and sharp perceptiveness. This is a book with heart and feeling.” (George Hodgman, author of Bettyville)
“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 both a literal and figurative pathway 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 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. Betsy Lerner is a beautiful, achingly honest writer, and The Bridge Ladies is at once heartbreaking and hilarious.” (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)
“A searching, funny, warm memoir.” (O, the Oprah Magazine)
“The Bridge Ladies reminded me of Tuesdays with Morrie, except it takes place on Mondays and has five Morries. 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)
From the Back Cover
A Bridge club provides an unexpected connection across a generational divide between mother and daughter. Betsy Lerner tells a funny, intimate, and deeply affecting story that’s a little about Bridge and a lot about life.
After a lifetime of defining herself against her mother’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell generation, Lerner found herself back home in the suburban town that represented everything she wanted to flee: namely the traditional life her mother stood for. Yet, when Roz needed help after surgery, Betsy stepped in. She expected a week of tense civility; what she got were the Bridge Ladies. Impressed by their faithful visits, she saw something her own generation lacked: Facebook was great, but it wouldn’t deliver a pot roast.
Tentatively at first, Betsy became a regular at her mother’s Monday Bridge club, falling under the spell of the intimidating game. Unexpectedly, the Bridge Ladies became a catalyst for change as Betsy and Roz reconciled years of painful misunderstandings and harrowing silences. The Bridge table became the common ground they never had.
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.
About the Author
Betsy Lerner is the author of The Forest for the Trees and Food and Loathing. She is a recipient of the Thomas Wolfe Poetry Prize, an Academy of American Poets Poetry Prize, and the Tony Godwin Prize for Editors, and was selected as one of PEN’s Emerging Writers. Lerner is a partner with the literary agency Dunow, Carlson & Lerner and resides in New Haven, Connecticut.
Most helpful customer reviews
43 of 43 people found the following review helpful.
Playing the hand you're dealt
By E.M. Bristol
When Betsy Lerner (author of "Forest for the Trees," and "Food and Loathing") was a little girl, the "Bridge Ladies," a group of suburban Jewish women in Connecticut who played the game regularly at her mother's house were a source of glamour, though as a teen, she later dismissed them as square and disconnected from the growing feminist movement. Years later with a husband and daughter of her own, Betsy moved back to her parents' area, first in order to help her father who had a stroke. Later, in the winter of 2013, she came to the aid of her mother, who was recovering from surgery, and discovered that the Bridge ladies, were still a fixture, bringing food and meeting for games about fifty years later. To her surprise, after asking to sit in on a game, Betsy developed an interest in the game and began to take lessons. She also became interested in the five women's lives and began to interview them as well, a process which would wind up lasting almost three years (and culminate with this memoir). Her journey would take her to places like the Manhattan Bridge Club (where she found the teachers varied greatly in their effectiveness and humility), into therapy to help her understand the friction in her relationship with her own mother, and into five remarkable octogenarians': Rhoda, Bette, Bea, Jackie and Roz's lives.
At first, Betsy, a literary agent without a knack for numbers found mastering bridge tricky but was aided when a teacher recommended that she think of playing Bridge as telling a story. Eventually, she began to fill in on occasion at the Bridge table for her mother's group. She also began discovering that her ideas of who the Bridge ladies were weren't quite accurate to say the least. But though they didn't share (or overshare) the way later generations do, they still revealed fascinating things about their lives. From them, Betsy learned about how that generation handled issues like infertility, adoption and even the death of a young child. She also learned about their interests, educational experiences and romantic relationships both then and now. In doing so, Betsy came to better understand herself, her mother in a way that she hadn't been able to previously, and the game of Bridge, which turned out to be less dry than it had seemed to her as a teen. "Bridge," she writes, "is the mother of all metaphors."
It's been said that well-behaved women seldom make history, but they are capable of making absorbing, even moving reading with the right author. And Betsy would agree. "They haven't fought any wars or even picketed any causes. For the most part, they upheld the conventions they were raised with. Mostly, they've hung in." But, she concludes, "I never thought I would say this, but I think the Bridge Ladies are brave." It's more than likely that the reader will share her view.
29 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
A poignant look at aging, across the generation gap
By S. McGee
Betsy Lerner's relationship with her mother was always fraught, from the time when, as a pot-smoking rebellious teenager, she balked at her mother's goals for her: marriage to a nice Jewish man, followed by children. Decades later, married and with a daughter, Lerner is living close to her widowed octogenarian mother in New Haven, and is married with a daughter, but their relationship is still strained: her mother still rolls her eyes at everything from Lerner's clothing choices to the fact that a rug in her household is fraying at its edges. Could joining in at the fringes of her mother's 50-year-old bridge game -- a circle of Jewish matrons whom Lerner has watched mature and grow old, and whose children she grew up alongside in Connecticut -- give her insight into her mother and her own generation? And is there a wider lesson here for Lerner's readers?
The answer to the first is yes, perhaps -- or at least, there is a measure of peace to be found for the restless Lerner who seems to struggle constantly with the idea that these women, who came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, might have priorities so very different from her own. Why didn't they yearn for more? More from a marriage? More of a personal life? More open exchanges with their friends in their weekly bridge games? These are questions she keeps returning to in her conversations with each of these women, individually and collectively, and in her own ruminations. The women, for their part, deal with her graciously; Lerner sometimes sounds like the irritating adolescent still struggling to define herself against her elders.
Lerner also sets out to study the game of Bridge itself -- to immerse herself in its rules and strategy, with decidedly uneven results. The contrast between her frustration as she tries, in a half-hearted and frustrated manner, to acquire Bridge skills, and the smooth prowess with which her mother's circle have honed their skills over the years, is telling, and reflects an underlying theme of the book, even if it's one I'm not altogether sure that Lerner recognized she was developing.
For me, the real poignancy and appeal of this memoir were to be found in the way Lerner has captured the grace, fortitude, stubbornness and dignity with which a generation of Jewish matrons in a particular corner of the world are choosing to experience their final years. They know, better than we, what it is like, and that what lies ahead will mean further lack of dignity and independence. They have experienced far more than we have, and done it without asking all and sundry for emotional support or mood-altering medications. I don't know that I'd find them easy to live with, but I came away from this book admiring their stoicism, their faith to their principles as they saw them, and their lack of sentimentality. I didn't see it as humorous or funny, as others have noted, but rather as a moving testimonial to how a group of women adjust to moving through the stages of life and dealing with challenges and setbacks, as recounted through the eyes of a not-always-comprehending member of the next generation.
Ultimately, though, it's a memoir -- another memoir about strained and troubled family relationships, and while it's well-written, that part of it doesn't really rise beyond the pack. And the group of five women, for all Lerner's careful efforts to make them distinct personalities, ultimately aren't that different. I remember that Rhoda was the beauty and Bette was the wannabe actress, but beyond that, the specifics of their lives blur slightly. The collective, however, is interesting enough to make this appeal to avid memoir readers. If you're not interested in this particular demographic, or type of memoir (mothers/daughters; the elderly reminiscing) I would steer clear. It doesn't contain the same magical "ingredient X" that some memoirs do that make it rise above the pack.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Lacks
By Gramma B
I was a little disappointed with this. I thought it would be more about the ladies playing bridge and their lives. It started out ok but the author quickly made it all about her and how she related to them and her life. She complains about her mother a lot and feels her mother was always too critical and remote. Betsy doesn't seem to realize how critical she is of her mother and that perhaps her mother may be hurt by that. I wouldn't recommend this book unless you want to read about a boring self absorbed author.
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