The Bridge Ladies
A Memoir
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- €5.99
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- €5.99
Publisher Description
For the past fifty years, Monday afternoons in New Haven have always been the same: Roz, Rhoda, Bea, Jackie and Bette - the Bridge Ladies. A card table with four folding chairs (and one dummy seat). A plate of homemade cookies or brownies on the kitchen counter somewhere, largely untouched. And once they begin the game, hours of silence, punctuated only by the sound of cards being plucked up or snapped down.
As a child, Betsy Lerner thought the Bridge Ladies were fascinatingly chic, with their frosted hair-dos and shiny nylons. To the teenage Betsy, they seemed hopelessly square. As an adult, working in New York City, they were a relic of her past. But when her husband accepted a job in New Haven, she found herself right back where she started.
Suddenly, the Bridge Ladies came hurtling back, their Monday lunch and Bridge Club still ongoing. They had accepted their lot in life and were, mostly, grateful. They didn't talk about their problems, much less those involving sex, relationships, or their children. On paper, they were unremarkable, even dull. But once Betsy started really looking at them, she realized that they were anything but.
Wildly perceptive and, in turns, hilarious and fearlessly vulnerable, Lerner's memoir is required reading for anyone who has ever had a mother. And it teaches us an important lesson: Facebook may connect us across the world, but social media can't deliver a pot roast and it won't dry your tears.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This absorbing memoir by literary agent and author Lerner (The Forest for the Trees) is about the game of bridge, but it's also about bridging gaps both the generational gap and the "personal gulf" that had defined Lerner's relationship with her mother. At age 54, due to her husband's job relocation, Lerner finds herself back in her hometown of New Haven, Conn., where her 83-year-old widowed mother still resides. Hoping to repair at least some of the rifts between them, she somewhat reluctantly re-enters her mother's life and begins attending her Monday afternoon bridge game, first as an observer and later after taking lessons at the Manhattan Bridge Club as an occasional participant. Along with descriptions of her bridge lessons, Lerner shares the histories of the elegantly dressed New Haven ladies who have met weekly for 55 years, women who came of age in the 1940s and '50s. As Lerner probes marriage, career, motherhood, postpartum depression, aging, death, assisted living, dementia, widowhood, religion, and sex, she discovers that although her mother and her bridge companions differ in some ways from her own generation (for example, they felt that marriage to a Jewish man trumped pursuing a career), they share common values of love and kinship. She also draws closer to her mother, gaining a deeper understanding of her interior life, including the rarely discussed childhood death of Lerner's sister. This beautifully written, bittersweet story of ladies of a certain age and era will have wide appeal.
