THE BRIDGE LADIES

The Bridge Ladies have know each other from fifty years of playing Bridge. These women come from a different stock. In the first place, they accepted their lot. They were grateful for it! There was no Oprah or Dr. Phil imploring them to love themselves first; their lives weren’t an ongoing project in self-improvement and actualization. For the Bridge lades, the unexamined life was worth living. If anything, they don’t understand our self-obsession, our selfishness. This isn’t the Me Generation. These women don’t openly share their feelings. Pain is a private matter. Their stories are moving and poignant. And always surprising.

For the past fifty years, Monday afternoons in New Haven were always the same. Roz, Rhoda, Bea, Jackie, and Bette. A card table with four folding chairs (and one dummy seat). The old deck of cards in their worn-out cardboard box. 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 into a row along the perimeter of the table. For Betsy Lerner, it was her routine by proxy. As a child, the Bridge Ladies, her mother Roz and her four best friends, were fascinatingly chic, with their frosted hairdos and shiny nylons, serious about the game in a way that sent her tiptoeing around the corners of the living room. Later, when Betsy was a teenager, the women seemed hopelessly square and out of touch, perfectly content to sit idle as the sexual revolution erupted outside. And as an adult, comfortably established in New York City, living the dream of a successful career in publishing, to Betsy, the Bridge Ladies were a distant relic of her past—a moment in time around which her childhood and adolescent memories spun. Then, her husband accepted a job in New Haven, and she found herself right back where she started. Suddenly, as taking care of aging Roz became a bit more hands-on, the days of the Bridge Ladies came hurtling back, their Monday lunch and Bridge Club still ongoing for over fifty years. These women weren’t extraordinary, on paper. To Betsy, they once were the most boring people on the planet. However, once she started looking, really looking, at them, that was the farthest thing from the truth. In her book, The Bridge Ladies, Betsy will create a group portrait of the Ladies, what they’ve shared with each other over the past fifty years, but also what they keep to themselves. She has spent almost a year getting to know them and attending games. She plans to sit in and for another a year or so and continue extensive interviews, branching out to the ladies’ children and husbands. She will weave together scenes from the Bridge Games with stories from their lives. Betsy Lerner is the author of two books, The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers (Riverhead), which has remained in print since its publication in 2000, and Food and Loathing (Simon & Schuster, 2003), a memoir. As a book editor, a literary agent, and a writer, Betsy has given a wide range of talks, lectures and classes at Columbia University, Yale University, Breadloaf Writers Conference, Miami Book Fair, and LA Times Book Fair, to name a few. And her popular blog on writing and publishing, www.betsylerner.com, has received over a millions hits over the four years she has posted on a daily basis. She still posts bi-weekly.