New York Times Editor’s Choice , Indie Next Pick, Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction 2023, Kirkus Best Nonfiction 2023, Amazon Best of the Month, B&N Most Anticipated Jennette McCurdy Book Club Pick

“Extraordinary.”—Sarah Jessica Parker

“The writing is pure elegance.”—Lisa Taddeo

“Mind-blowing!”—Lena Dunham

Gorgeous, timeless, and wise.—Amanda Montell, author of Cultish

“Spare and direct, with flashes of Didionesque elegance.”—Bret Easton Ellis, Bret Easton Ellis Podcast

“Creatively exceptional.”—Booklist (starred review)

“This brutal, illuminating account reads like a contemporary Girl, Interrupted.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A spellbinding memoir.”—Kirkus (starred review)

“Propulsive, intense, moving, and breathtakingly honest. What a writer!”—Molly Shannon

“This unsparing memoir reveals Carrière’s extraordinary courage, her brilliance, and her willingness to forgive.”—Susanna Moore, author of Miss Aluminum

“I read this brilliant book in one mad gulp.”—Kate Christensen, PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author of The Great Man

Alice Carrière grew up in a converted factory in Greenwich Village in the 1990s, an extravagant home based on the hyper-aestheticized vision of her artist mother, Jennifer Bartlett—with two studios, an indoor swimming pool, a rooftop garden with a koi pond, and multiple, cavernous rooms through which a steady stream of visitors flowed. Alice’s iconoclastic European father was a fleeting, atmospheric disturbance.

Alice grows up as a child living in an adult’s world, with little-to-no boundaries or supervision. As she enters adolescence, a dissociative disorder erases her identity, and overzealous doctors medicate her further into madness. In the absence of self, she inhabits various roles: as a patient in expensive psychiatric hospitals, the ingenue in destructive encounters with older men, a provocateur who weaponizes intellectual dazzle and outrageous candor—until a medication-induced psychosis brings these personas crashing down. Finally, a soulful connection with a generous and sensitive musician allows her to free herself from the pathologies that defined her and recognize her true self. With gallows humor and brutal honesty, Carrière has written a unique and mesmerizing narrative of emergence and, at last, cure.

PRODUCT DETAILS

ISBN: 9781954118294
Price: $28.00
On-sale date: 8/29/2023
Weight: 1.19 lbs.