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    The Bridge Ladies: A Memoir
    The Bridge Ladies: A Memoir
    The Bridge Ladies: A Memoir
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Bridge Ladies: A Memoir

    Written by Betsy Lerner

    Narrated by Orlagh Cassidy

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateMay 3, 2016
    ISBN9780062466808
    Author

    Betsy Lerner

    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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    Reviews for The Bridge Ladies

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      Enjoyable, sometimes funny, sometimes sobering memoir of 5 Jewish women and their weekly bridge club of 50 years. Written by Betsy Lerner, a daughter of one member, who has had a conflicted relationship with her mother long into adulthood. Once she moved back to the same state and town as her mother, she forced herself to deal with the scars of her inner self. The members are now in their 80's and Betsy joins their bridge group, at first as an onlooker, and is stunned by the lack of intimacy among these women who not only played bridge together but socialized together as couples. For over a year she pursues this weekly game a well as individual interviews with the women about their youth, what they expected and what was expected of them in adulthood. Betsy also took up the game of bridge and took up a new therapist. Her main goal was to understand her mother and reconcile their differences. Through the game of bridge, Betsy learned a lot about herself and her failings. And it was a catalyst for finding common ground with her mother. Lerner writes honestly about herself and the women (sometimes brutally so, I think) but also with humor. It's a story about a woman who spent years in and out of therapy and was ready for maybe the biggest step and final hurdle in satisfying her inner child and her own self.
    • 3/5
      I picked up this book because I loved to play bridge and I thought it would be interesting to see bridge from the point of view of someone who was trying to learn to play. However, that's not what it turned out to be. Yes, it did sections when the author talked about the difficulty of learning to play, but it mostly centered around the relationships of the "Bridge Ladies", how they came together over the years, and how the game was their release, a time when they could ignore the world and just play a game.It wasn't anything special and I doubt I would have picked it up if I'd known what it was about at the start.
    • 3/5
      I've never been the biggest fan of biographies, but over the past few months, I've read and enoyed a few great memoirs (Roald Dahl's Boy, Tara Westover's Educated, Trevor Noah's Born a Crime) and throught I might like to continue the trend. To that end, I googled a few "best of" lists online and ordered put five on hold at the library, and this is one of them.From its description and a few reviews, The Bridge Ladies seemed like it would be a really fun, quirky memoir, and a nice change of pace from the harrowing (though interesting) tales of abuse, sexism, racism, and religious fanaticism in the memoirs I've read lately. This book started off well enough, but never really seemed to get going, and by page 46, my interest had waned—and worse, there didn't seem to be any chance of it picking up later.Part of the problem was that I just couldn't connect with the author. About the time she mentioned spending years in therapy, where she says she "alternately blamed [her] mother for all [her] ills, felt compassion for her, judged her, hated her, and accepted her," I knew this wasn't the book for me (p. 45). The lifestyle where everyone has a therapist and talks about their therapy sessions at cocktail parties is completely foreign to me, and there was nothing about the book that drew me into that world or helped me to understand it. Even though, on the surface, my life is closer to Betsy Lerner's than to Trevor Noah's or Tara Westover's, I felt a much greater connection to their stories than to (what I read of) Lerner's.To be fair to Lerner, this may have as much to do with my life and relationship with my mother as it does with her writing. I grew up an only child living with my mother, who died when I was eighteen. We were extraordinarily close. I can perfectly understand Trevor Noah's love and respect for his awesome mother, and I can empathize with Tara Westover's painful and complicated relationship with the mother who often failed to protect her or support her, but the idea of not really being close to one's mother, not having much of a relationship with her, baffles me.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed listening to this--but I must admit I was never convinced it was not a work of fiction. Really? Her mother's friends. Ever shared? Never hugged? Seems a bit off from the nonogenerians I know. Perhaps this is a cultural thing, but I find it hard to believe. That, and the scoring system she uses!But it helped to pass the 18 hour drive from Bethesda to Indianapolis and back! Thanks!
    • 5/5
      The author and her family move close to her mother in CN. In order to make peace and to get to know her mother better, she begins to go to her mother's bridge club. She ends up making peace, understanding how her mother's generation lived, and learning how to play bridge. EXCELLENT!
    • 4/5
      I was reminded of The Joy Luck Club while reading this true story about a woman who joins her octogenarian mother's bridge club. It was a pleasant read overall and a nice study on the relationship between mothers and daughters. There are also some nice tidbits on East Coast Jewish culture.
    • 4/5
      4.5 starsBetsy Lerner started out writing a tale about the five Jewish women who made up her mother’s decades-long bridge club group. For three years, she observed their bridge club, interviewed each woman and her children, and set about learning to play bridge to further understand these women. When she began her project, Betsy and her mother had a troubled relationship that had carried over from when she was a teen. As she got to know all of the women better, she also began to view her mother in an altogether new light and set about healing their relationship. She came to understand that while they grew up in a very different time period and seemed a bit old fashioned to her that these women were actually tough, accomplished women who had lived and were continuing to live wonderful lives.The aspects of the group that fascinated Betsy also intrigued me. While the group meet every Monday for over fifty years, there was so much they chose not to share with each other instead just enjoying the company of each other. I loved getting to know each woman’s story and realizing how different it was to come of age in the 1950’s when getting married and having children was the goal for many women. The world has changed so much since they were young and sometimes it is hard to remember that.Parts of the book were very sad as Betsy Lerner addressed the issue of aging and how unpleasant it really is. As I deal with similar issues with my parents, those sections really hit home for me.My favorite part of the book was all of the historical and contemporary references sprinkled throughout from Edith Wharton to The Shining to Fiddler on the Roof to coffee commercials – a few I even had to look up. I also liked that each section of a chapter was separated by spades – a very clever touch for a book about bridge. Since I do not play bridge, I will say that at times the details regarding bridge made those sections drag a bit for me.I highly recommend this book. Thanks to Shelf Awareness and HarperCollins for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
    • 4/5
      A fascinating memoir about a woman attempting to reconnect with her eighty plus year old mother by getting involved in her mother's passion Bridge. Her mother has played Bridge with the same group of ladies for over fifty years, Over the course of the book we learn the back stories of the back stories of the other women. Ms. Lerner learns Bridge herself to further understand their attraction to this complex game. I would have never believed that I would have enjoyed a book based on this premise but I did. An interesting book on relationships and aging.
    • 4/5
      I loved this book because my mother played bridge and it just brought back such wonderful memories of her getting ready to have her bridge friends over and how we all had to get the house ready and then disappear after the ladies arrived. This book is a memoir by Betsy Lerner about her mother and her bridge group of fifty years. I give her a lot of credit for learning how to play bridge while writing this book, I never got the hang of it! Anyway, this is really about the bonds of mothers and daughters and I never get tired of reading about that.
    • 4/5
      The Bridge Ladies is a memoir about a group of ladies who got together every Monday afternoon for 50 years to play bridge. On the surface, it's a book about the game of bridge but in reality it's so much more.'I disrespected her for only caring about how things looked. I never understood how much there was to hide.' This is one of Betsy's comments about her mom very early in the book. They had a complicated mother daughter relationship. Betsy grew up in the age of women's liberation wanting to pursue a career before marriage. Her mom grew up in the age when getting married and staying married was the goal of every woman. Betsy spent a lot of money in therapy to better understand her mother but it was only by joining her mom's bridge group and learning more about her mom as a person and not as her mother, that she was able to understand how much of her mother's life she knew so little about and that it was these hidden parts that defined the person her mother was.Even though the central part of this story is about Betsy and her mother, there are also the other four women in the bridge group that Betsy interviews and that we get to know. Through her understanding of the women as individuals and as a group, we get a glimpse into a generation where secrets aren't shared with the world and opinions are kept quiet. It's a wonderful look at the generation that my Mom is part of and reading it gave me some insight into her life.Thanks Betsy for sharing this book with your readers. I think it will be a great book for mothers and daughters to read together and discuss.
    • 4/5
      It's always curious looking at a community from the outside. It's perhaps curiouser to look at a community from the inside. When that community includes your mother and ladies you've known, but not really known in depth, for decades, it is curiouser and curiouser. Betsy Lerner's interesting and warm memoir, The Bridge Ladies, looks at her mother and women she's been playing bridge with for more than half a century. It looks at their lives, the expectations they faced, and how they have always interacted together. It also looks at Lerner's relationship with her mother and how her investigations into the game of bridge brings them closer than they have ever been.Betsy Lerner grew up watching her mother and the four other women of the group meet weekly for their standing bridge game. As a child she was intrigued by the women and that interest reignited when she went to care for her mother after a surgery. She knew what these women had lived through in broad strokes, both historically and locally, but she had no idea of their smaller personal histories. And she had an image in her mind of the way that their longstanding friendship worked, imagining that it was similar to that of her own friendships with peers. But over the course of time, as she was cautiously welcomed into the group, she discovered that her ideas about the ladies, and about her own mother in particular, were in fact quite off the mark. Lerner interviews each of the women about her life and life choices. She wonders at the way that these ladies kept their own council, maintained their reserve, and, most interestingly of all, didn't gossip at the bridge table. This behaviour is in direct contrast to Lerner's own experience with her generation, the Baby Boomers. These five Jewish women, all of whom had married and had children, as was expected of them, had a long history with each other and yet still they didn't share confidences. Over time, as Lerner questioned them, they opened up slightly more to her, especially as it became clear that Lerner had a sincere interest in getting to know them better, to appreciate the lives they chose and led, and to leave judgments aside. Even so, they kept a dignified reticence about certain things. In understanding this dignity in the others, Lerner comes to appreciate it and forgive what she once thought of only as distance in her own mother too.Lerner uses the game of bridge and the lives of the other ladies as a bridge to understanding and repairing her fraught relationship with her own mother. Chapters where she goes to learn the game herself are interspersed with her interactions with the ladies and her mother. Just as Lerner slowly comes to appreciate the complications and beauty of the game, she comes to appreciate the lives of women who chose to live so very differently than she herself did a generation later. She may not understand their life choices (or exactly how the bidding is a conversation between partners obliquely telling each other what they have in their hands) but she learns to value the lives they've led, to honor the secrets they've kept, and to let go the differences that separated her from her mother (and to at least understand the process of an opening bid). There are many comparisons to her own life, a highlighting of major differences, the contrast between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers evident in so many ways. Lerner also confronts the sadness of aging and decline, acknowledging that growing older necessarily robs a person of independence, diminishing them, and undermining the person they were when they were young. She sees the appeal of the comfort and familiarity of routine that has kept the ladies gathering around the bridge table for so many years. This is a very personal exploration of relationship, family, and friendship. Accessible and interesting, the memoir is a quick read, blending Lerner's experiences with the conventional lives against which she spent her teen and early adult years rebelling. That bridge and the bridge ladies bridged this long divide is both lovely and fitting. The complex game that seems to be restricted to the elderly these days proved a life learning experience and an insight into a very different community for sure. How curious.
    • 4/5
      Writer/editor/agent Betsy Lerner’s relationship with her mother, Roz, has been strained since childhood, and when a job move brings her back to Roz’s town of New Haven, Connecticut, Lerner hopes to improve their relationship. Through getting to know the women of Roz’s decades-long bridge club, and getting to know the game itself, Lerner finds another, metaphoric, bridge.What’s that joke about restaurant food? -- “it wasn’t good and there was too little of it.” That was my reaction during the first half or so of this memoir -- there was too little of the author and I didn’t much like her. But through biographies of Roz and her friends, interesting portraits eventually emerge of mid-century women’s marriages, families, friends, losses. And respect and empathy emerge too, in Lerner's authorial voice, and won me over.(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)