Special guest Betsy Lerner helps celebrate October’s best books.

On this episode of Fully Booked, we’re highlighting the hottest titles of the month of October—the books you’ll want to snuggle up with as the leaves begin to fall. First, fiction editor Laurie Muchnick, nonfiction editor John McMurtrie, and young readers’ editors Mahnaz Dar and Laura Simeon join us to discuss some of their top picks in books for the month. Then, Betsy Lerner joins me to discuss Shred Sisters(Grove, Oct. 1), a debut novel Kirkus calls “a seamlessly constructed and absorbing fictional world, full of insight about how families work.”

Novelist is the latest in Lerner’s long list of literary appellations. She was a book editor for 15 years. She’s now an agent—a partner in Dunow, Carlson, and Lerner Literary Agency—and the author of several books of nonfiction, including The Bridge Ladies, The Forest for the Trees, and Food and Loathing. With Temple Grandin, she is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns and Abstractions.

Here’s a bit more of our starred review of Shred Sisters: “‘Here are the ways I could start this story,’ Amy Shred says, offering three choices in a brief prologue to memoirist and literary agent Lerner’s debut novel. ‘Olivia was breathtaking.’ ‘For a long time, I was convinced that she was responsible for everything that went wrong.’ ‘No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister.’ The engaging, thoughtful voice established here goes on to unfold the story of Amy’s childhood, coming of age, and early adulthood, all profoundly shaped by the wild trajectory of her older sister: a rebel, a runaway, a mental patient, a dropout, a thief, a missing person. Amy herself—called Bunny or Bun in the family—is the classic supersmart miserable outsider, bullied at school, friendless, always bewildered at the utter unfairness of life.…The story unfolds with the verisimilitude of a memoir: Amy’s nuanced relationships with her mother, her father, and her partners are all utterly convincing and relatable. Her mother, Lorraine, is a particularly fine creation, both a very specific East Coast Jewish type and an archetypal maternal presence. ‘In the months and years after she died, I often saw the world through her eyes, as if I had inherited her mantle of judgment, her scoreboard in the sky.’ Many of us know that feeling exactly.”

Lerner kicks us off by reading aloud from the first page of Shred Sisters, in which younger sister Amy Shred takes a few runs at describing her beguiling older sister, Olivia, and their complicated relationship. The story begins with Olivia crashing through a window; and we discuss how this exposes the Shred family’s dynamics—particularly the impact of Olivia’s behavior on everyone else. We consider whether the book has a happy or hopeful ending, the relationship between Amy and her mother, Lerner’s writerly obsession with mother-daughter relationships, and the possibility of imbuing fiction with the verisimilitude of memoir. We talk about Shred Sisters’ nomination for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, what it’s like to play a new role (debut novelist) in a known world (publishing), how to go viral on TikTok, how to pick the perfect author photo, and much more.

BEST BOOKS OF OCTOBER 2024:

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst (Random House)

The Driving Machine: A Design History of the Car by Witold Rybczynski (Norton)

The Table by Winsome Bingham and Wiley Blevins, illus. by Jason Griffin (Neal Porter/Holiday House)

Tangleroot by Kalela Williams (Feiwel & Friends)

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

The Good Night Garage by Tori Kosara, illus. by Meg Hunt

You Can Do Hard Things by Dana Sutton, illus. by Nicholas Donovan Mueller

Caregiving by Dr. Eboni Ivory Green

Tough Girl by John Zaiss

Fully Booked is produced by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.