“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 tells the story of her unconventional upbringing in Greenwich Village as the daughter of a remote mother, the renowned artist Jennifer Bartlett, and a charismatic father, European actor Mathieu Carrière. From an early age, Alice is forced to navigate her mother’s recovered memories of ritualized sexual abuse, which she turns into art, and her father’s confusing attentions. Her days are a mixture of privilege, neglect, loneliness, and danger—a child living in an adult’s world, with little-to-no enforcement of boundaries or supervision.

When she enters adolescence, Alice begins to lose her grasp on herself, as a dissociative disorder erases her identity and overzealous doctors medicate her further away from herself. She inhabits various roles: as a patient in expensive psychiatric hospitals, a denizen of the downtown New York music scene, the ingenue in destructive encounters with older men—ricocheting from experience to experience until a medication-induced psychosis brings these personas crashing down. Eventually, she finds purpose in caring for her mother as she descends into dementia, in a love affair with a recovering addict who steadies her, in confronting her father whose words and actions splintered her, and in finding her voice as a writer.

With gallows humor and brutal honesty, Everything/Nothing/Someone explores what it means for our body and mind to belong to us wholly, irrevocably, and on our own terms. In pulsing, energetic prose that is both precise and probing, Alice manages to untangle the stories told to her by her parents, the American psychiatric complex, and her own broken mind to craft a unique and mesmerizing narrative of emergence and, finally, cure.

PRODUCT DETAILS

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