Betsy Lerner doesn’t see herself as a TikTok star – though the New York Times described her as one – or an influencer. That means payment and swag – all she’s had is a free pen. “I really do it for myself,” she says, “and for the people who follow me”.
Lerner, 64, has for 20 years worked as a literary agent for writers including Patti Smith and Temple Grandin. She’s an author of nonfiction and now of a debut novel, Shred Sisters – “a love letter to loneliness”. But the “doing” she’s talking about is on TikTok, where she has amassed 1.5m likes for videos in which she reads from the diaries she wrote in her turbulent 20s.
“You don’t know who you’ll love, who will love you, what you will do for work, what is your purpose,” she says in one post. “This morning I found one line in my diary that just sums [your 20s] up: ‘I feel as if I don’t know who I am, today.’”
Lerner posts in her dressing gown, without makeup. Initially she explored BookTok to support her authors. But with her own novel forthcoming, she started posting, camera off, and got no followers. “A friend told me, you need to be on camera and think of it as your own TV channel … I thought, ‘Well, maybe I will read from my old diaries.’”
She’d kept one from the age of 11, after reading Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. “I wrote my first poems in there. I vented. I tried to analyse myself …” Her journals from the ages of 12 to 18 were lost when her car was stolen, but those from her 20s – about 30 volumes – were stowed in a crawl space in her attic.
“My diaries are very sad. They’re all about being lonely, looking for love, looking for friendship, trying to figure out who I was,” she says.
Lerner describes herself as “a late bloomer”. She was accepted on to Columbia’s MFA poetry programme at 26, entering publishing in her late 20s when most editorial assistants were fresh from college. “I didn’t fall in love till I was 30. I’d never had any significant relationships … I lost a lot of my teenage years and most of my 20s struggling with depression.”
When she was 15, her parents had taken her to a psychiatrist, and she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. “I didn’t want to accept that I had this illness. I fought it a lot,” she says. Her 2003 memoir, Food and Loathing, documents her relationship with her weight, food, depression and more, and at one point in her late 20s describes her straddling a ledge on a bridge above the Hudson River.
The turning point came at 30. She found a psychopharmacologist – who “figured out” the right lithium dosage (they’ve worked together for 35 years) – and she got married.
Her diaries stopped. She had written them alone in bed at night. But now, “I just didn’t feel that sad and lonely any more”, she says.
For years, Lerner says, “I gravitated toward a lot of intensity.” Now, “I prioritise stability over everything.”
She had never thought she’d write a novel. But in 2019 she came through “four very tragic deaths”. She lost her mother, then her teenage niece and nephew, Ruby and Hart Campbell, who were killed by a drunk driver, and her best friend, the writer George Hodgman, who died by suicide. “I still don’t know who I’m grieving for at any given time,” she says.
In the aftermath of these deaths she started to write Shred Sisters, partly inspired by the online workouts – shredding – she and her two sisters did during Covid to take care of each other, and as “a way of working through all of that grief”. She is already writing another novel, and for as long as there is material in the diaries, and there is TikTok, she will continue to share them. “It’s all about trying to connect and communicate,” she says.
“There’s a constant stream of comments from kids in their 20s who identify with my struggles. That’s really what keeps me going. I feel this connection to these kids … I try to say, I felt the same. Hang in. Some heart emojis. Just a little something to say, ‘You’re recognised.’”
Shred Sisters is out now, published by Verve Books. To support the Guardian, order a copy from the Guardian bookshop. Delivery fees may apply.
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