No One Gets to Fall Apart
A Memoir
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Notable Book
A Best Book of the Year — NPR, Esquire, Elle
Finalist for the Writers’ League of Texas Book Award
Longlisted for Reading the West
“Brilliant . . . stunning . . . deserves a place alongside modern classics like Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle and Tara Westover’s Educated.” — Susannah Cahalan, New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire
“A triumph.” — Lorrie Moore, author of I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
On a highway in Houston, Texas, Sarah LaBrie’s mother was found screaming at passing cars, terrified she would be murdered by invisible assailants. The diagnosis of schizophrenia that followed compelled Sarah to rethink her childhood, marked at turns by violence and all-consuming closeness.
Digging into the events that led to her mother’s break, Sarah traces her family history of mental illness, from the dysphoria that plagued her great-grandmother, a granddaughter of slaves, to her own experience with depression as a scholarship student at Brown. At the same time, she navigates a decades-long fixation on a novel she can’t finish but can't abandon, her complicated feelings about her white partner, and a fraught friendship colored by betrayal.
Spanning the globe from Houston’s Third Ward to Paris to Tallinn and New York to Los Angeles, No One Gets to Fall Apart is an unflinching chronicle of one woman's attempt to forge a new future through a better understanding of the past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this spellbinding debut, Minx producer LaBrie reckons with her mother's mental illness and her own relationship to work. Raised in Houston's Third Ward by a loving but unstable and borderline schizophrenic mother, LaBrie escaped to college in Rhode Island on a scholarship. During her studies, however, she felt depressed and stuck, unable to finish a novel or shake off the rage instilled in her during her volatile childhood. She wrote poetry and short fiction, flitting listlessly between cities and readings throughout early adulthood, both propelled by and frightened of her writerly ambitions. After a series of ketamine therapy sessions and a particularly ridiculous reading at an indulgent art gallery, she realized that"following the literary world feels more and more like watching the fragile children of aristocrats gingerly explore their talents while their friends applaud and the world around them burns." She decided to write a TV pilot, taking her first wobbly steps toward a career in Los Angeles; meanwhile, she began to unpack the effects on her of her mother's behavior, and eventually ushered her into treatment. With unflinching honesty ("I am so terribly sick of cannibalizing my life for art") and lyrical prose, LaBrie elegantly captures the grunt work of self-acceptance.
