The Bridge Ladies (31 page)

First and foremost, my deepest thanks to the Bridge Ladies: Bette Horowitz n
é
e Cohen, Jackie Podoloff n
é
e Brody, Beatrice Phillips n
é
e Bernstein, Rhoda Meyers n
é
e Freedman, and Roz Lerner n
é
e Cohen. They welcomed me into their club, invited me for lunch and Bridge every Monday, sat down with me for multiple conversations, and let me play at their table. It was a great honor.

I am also grateful to the Bridge daughters who spoke with me about their memories of the Bridge club: Lisa Podoloff Boles, Davi Horowitz, Amy Horowitz, Nancy Phillips Meredith, and Beth Meyers Stubenhaus. And to Dick Podoloff, who was always an enthusiastic participant.

My sisters, Gail Lerner and Nina Palmer, generously shared their time and memories with me. They have both been incredibly supportive of this project, reading multiple drafts and giving comments and encouragement. Thank you both so much.

Colleagues and friends to whom I am also deeply grateful include Amy Williams, Caron Knauer, Leah Hager Cohen, Sylvie
Rabineau, Georgina Morley, Mizzi Vander Pluijm, Erin Hosier, Jennifer Carlson, and Henry Dunow. I am indebted to Rosemary Mahoney, who once again generously applied her sharp mind and pencil.

My interns Casey Blue James, E-Lynn Yap, Arielle Datz, and Ana Barros helped me tremendously over the years. To my teachers who all moved the needle of my fledgling game a little further: Ellen Friedman, Al Pol, Barbara Bayone, Jeff Bayone, and Wendy Frieden. My greatest debt goes to Jess Jurkovic, who offered his expertise, his friendship, and his gift of description in parsing the complexities of Bridge.

To my Bridge buddies: Barbara and Bernard Barkin, Anne Dailey, Jack Hitt, Rick Prum, Tina Pohlman, Dan Greenberg, Simon Lipskar, Eamon Dolan, and Matty Goldberg. Thank you for playing with me. ;)

I am enormously grateful to my agent, David Black. As a fellow agent, I can only say that his guidance in this process has been inspiring. His friendship, support, stamina, expertise, and intensity continue to astonish me from the first phone call on. My thanks to the wonderful people at the Black agency: Susan Raihofer, Sarah Smith, Jenny Herrera, and Sarah Paolantonio.

Karen Rinaldi: thank you. Even when I wanted you to tire, you didn't! You pushed and challenged and prodded and I am so grateful for your editorial eye and publishing savvy. We, too, made a good team. Thank you for believing in the ladies, and me. I must also mention Hannah Robinson, assistant extraordinaire—aka The Slayer—and soon to run a major corporation. Thank you for everything. The entire Harper team has been incredibly supportive and creative. Thanks to Victoria Comella, Brian Perrin, Penny Makras, Tina Andreadis, Kathy Schneider, Virginia Stanley, Milan Bozic, Bill Ruoto, Nikki Baldauf, Jonathan Burnham, and Michael Morrison.

Last and most, I thank my daughter, Raffaella Sweet, who has set a very high bar for going big or going home. And my husband, John Donatich, who read every single draft and never stopped pushing me to do better, offering advice that always turned out to be exactly right. And for all that I mostly wanted to kill him.

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 currently resides in New Haven, Connecticut.

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Food and Loathing

The Forest for the Trees

Cover design by Milan Bozic

Cover illustration by Chris Silas Neal

THE BRIDGE LADIES.
Copyright © 2016 by Betsy Lerner. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

The Bridge Ladies
is a work of nonfiction. Some of the names and characteristics of people who appear in these pages have been changed to protect their privacy.

Excerpts from
Gabriel: A Poem
by Edward Hirsch, copyright © 2014 by Edward Hirsch. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lerner, Betsy.

Title: The bridge ladies : a memoir / Betsy Lerner.

Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Harper Wave, [2016]

Identifiers: LCCN 2015043022 | ISBN 9780062354464 (hardback) | ISBN 9780062467164 (large print)

EPub Edition May 2016 ISBN 9780062354488

Subjects: LCSH: Lerner, Betsy. | Literary agents—United States—Biography. | Bridge clubs—Social aspects—United States. | Women bridge players—United States. | Female friendship—United States. | Intergenerational relations—United States. | Mothers and daughters—United States. | Older women—United States—Social life and customs. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary. | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / General.

Classification: LCC CT275.L36795 A3 2016 | DDC 305.2092—dc23 LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043022

International ISBN: 978-0-06-256522-8

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