Poured Over: Alice Carrière on Everything/Nothing/Someone

Jenna Seery

“I wrote this very simply to stay alive.”

Alice Carrière’s beautiful and intense memoir of her unconventional childhood, her mental health journey through the failings of the psychiatric system and more that eventually led her to a life of reconciliation and reconstruction. Carrière joins us to talk about why she wrote the book now, the connectivity of writing and reading, her love of audiobooks and more with guest host Jenna Seery.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Jenna Seery and mixed by Harry Liang.       

Featured Books (Episode):
Everything/Nothing/Someone by Alice Carrière
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
The Watsons Go to Birmingham- 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis
Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector
Bloodchild by Octavia E. Butler

Full Episode Transcript
Jenna Seery
Hi, I’m Jenna Seery, a bookseller and the associate producer of Poured Over and today I am here with Alice Carrière, the author of an incredible, stunning memoir of her turbulent, incredible, interesting childhood and young adult life. Everything/Nothing/Someone is a memoir that will keep you turning the pages until the very end, it will have you feeling so many things. But altogether, it’s something I don’t think anyone is going to want to miss Alice, thank you so much for being here with us today.

Alice Carrière
Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for that incredible intro, and your kind words. And I just want to say I love your passion and enthusiasm for all things books. And I feel super, super, super grateful and lucky to be the recipient of that radiance. And I just I can’t believe I get to be here. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you,

We are so excited, because memoir is something that I think is such an often overlooked and sometimes sort of misunderstood genre and is such a huge topic, memoir. Okay, so it’s people’s lives. It’s so much more than that, though. There’s so much communion and connectivity that comes with writing and reading memoir. So I’m sure you’re gonna get asked this a million times. But why did you decide to tell this story now?

To survive the story. I wrote this very simply to stay alive. And I’ve been writing this for so long. I mean, I was on a gurney scribbling notes, I was, in a way telling the story before I could write. So when I was little, I would think in the third person, I would think about myself and the third person. So I would say, you know, she is walking down the street, the rain falls on her jacket. So I have always metabolize the chaos around me with storytelling. And at first it was to stay alive. I mean, but I think the experience and the motivation changed as I wrote it, and as I lived it, and first it was really triage. And then, as I developed the relationships that are discussed in this book, this life saving relationship I have with my husband. or my partner of 15 years and my husband, I was really able to turn out word and prioritize connecting with other people. So that was really what motivated me.

And I think that is overwhelmingly clear in this the some of the best moments in this book, some of the most poignant, the ones that I felt so in line with, and so able to connect with work, your relationships with others, even though some of them, many of them caused harm and felt that they set you down different paths. That constant searching to connect with those around you, I think is so it’s so much of why I think so many people turn to books and turn to memoirs to understand those connections and to feel that in a different way.

And I’m so glad that came across. And I think it’s also about it was really about connecting to myself because a big part of this book is about my struggle with dissociation, specifically depersonalization, where I wasn’t able to recognize my face in the mirror, I didn’t know where my words were coming from, I didn’t feel any connection to my body, my history, my story. And writing was really my only tether to myself into reality. There were many things that were attenuating my connection to myself, including the gross over prescription of psychotropic medication that I was subjected to, by my psychiatrist, or many psychiatrists, actually, writing was really about also connecting to myself, and I wrote myself into a place where I could feel and feel for others.

And I think for so many of us, that turned to books in those times, both reading and writing. It allows so much processing even though your childhood your upbringing is going to be radically different than I think most of the people that will encounter this book. There are so many universal feelings and universal moments where it’s like yeah, I felt that, I know that. And when you see it in a book, it allows you to process that in a different way than just having someone else tell it to you or encountering, you know, a textbook where you can read the definition of something, right? Knowing that someone encountered it and survived? It is so important.

And I think I think you’re absolutely right. And I think also what was so exciting about the process of writing this was recognizing all of the kind of poetry and parallels that were just scattered around my life and waiting for me to pick up and put together and synthesize. And I learned so much about myself, I learned so much about my mother, I wrote myself to a place of deep, deep empathy for all of these people who, I think told in maybe a less nuanced way not to toot my own horn but would be vilified in a really rigid way. And that was really exciting to find the poetry in my life. And it felt like such a gift. And I don’t know if it’s a gift that I gave myself, or it’s a gift that the universe gave me or that was really exciting. I think you’re absolutely right, that being able to write my own life, read my own life, and then acknowledge the ways in which it became something so much more was really exciting. And then now, the connecting with other people part, hearing other people respond is something out of a dream, I’m having. To be perfectly honest, I’m having a full on out of body experience right now. And that’s been a pretty sustained experience. Since this book has, you know, been almost birthed into the world.

I can only imagine sort of that daunting, yet freeing, yet terrifying and everyday experience of saying, okay, you know, it’s one thing to write it, it’s one thing to say, I’m gonna put this down on paper, it’s one thing to give it to your friends and family and say, Hey, I wrote this, but it’s a completely third alien thing to say, I’m going to give it to the world and leave it to any interpretation or any reaction. Right?

Yeah. I mean, who knew that even the dream come true stuff would cause dissociation? Because here I am dissociating my way through it. And I, I appreciate your understanding of how bizarre experience it is, should we explain what the book is about?

Yes, that was what I was gonna go to. I mean, yes. So, Alice, in your words, I always like to ask the authors to give their little synopsis to give their chance to explain this, because I can explain it and will explain it to anyone and everyone who will listen to me. But I would love to have your sort of synopsis of it.

Here’s a little brief pitch, and then I will elaborate more. So I think of it as a coming of age story about identity, family and human connection, a survival thriller about dissociative disorder and psychiatric malpractice and an unlikely love story. So that seemed kind of accurate. Yeah, I need your approval. So basically, I tell the story of being the daughter of two profoundly self-destructive, self-absorbed artists, who live in an alternate universe where the power of their minds can shape reality, according to them, and my mother was a renowned painter. And she was as renowned for the grandiose scale of her paintings as she was for her grandiosity in life. She was really larger than life. And she had implanted memories of ritualized sexual abuse and murder, which made her hide and her work and turn away from closeness with others. My father was a European sex symbol and intellectual, who treated parenthood as a radical experiment in the total annihilation of boundaries. And between the two of them, I was totally flooded by their very complicated desires, and I became everything. And then when I reached adolescence, I was confronted with a dissociative disorder, which blew away the last puff of diffuse selfhood I had, and I became nothing. And I described those symptoms earlier than not being able to recognize myself in the mirror. So I really was convinced I didn’t exist. And I reacted to that by continuing to self-harm that I had begun when I was seven years old. I first got when I was seven and bulging and substance abuse and destructive relationships. And then psychiatrists responded by prescribing me more and more and more and more psychotropic medications. And at one point, I was on nine medications, and that triggered a massive psychotic episode that lasted a year and almost killed me and And really the only things that saved me were writing and again, my relationship with my partner 15 years. And his compassion and rigorous kindness and patience really taught me how to turn outward. And it allowed me to connect with my mother when she was diagnosed with dementia. It motivated me to reconnect with my father from whom I’d been estranged for 12 years. And I managed to shed the diagnoses, shed the medications. And, as I said earlier, feel and feel for others and become someone. And there’s a lot more than that featuring intestinal worm in a mental institution that that very valuable cameo.

I mean, and that, that right, there should be enough for anyone to want to pick up the book, I can’t imagine that pitch not working on someone because it is truly everything that I look for in a good memoir, it is has so much heart and so much feeling behind it. It has is gorgeously written I mean, clearly the care you take with your sentences and with the choices you make is evident. And it takes something like mental health that is so easy to sensationalize, and in our current sort of pop culture climate, to sort of what like clickbait ties into these little moments that don’t understand the complicated and sort of ongoing nuance of mental health and mental health care for an individual. And yet, it’s all in one book, and you get to experience it. So I, like I said, can’t talk about it enough. And I’ve been telling everyone in the office.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I’m so excited.

I think it’s so much the importance of getting to tell our own stories is so evident in this in that. Sure this is a very distinct tale of one person who grew up in a very singular way. And yet, I found so many moments to connect to it. I know other people will find other moments to connect. But it is your story that you get to tell. And I think that that is an opportunity and a gift for us to read.

Oh, wow. Thank you so much. I what I really tried to achieve thinking about stories is really acknowledging how many, many, many, many things can be true at the same time. And that I could survive that revelation, because it really also is a story about different contradictory stories all occupying space at the same time. And that is the reason I got my relationship back with my father. It’s the reason I feel so much compassion for my mother. And I feel really honored and lucky that I got to that place where I could listen, because it is me telling my story. But it is also me listening, the thing that facilitated the telling of that story was to really listen. And I think so much of my experience. And so much of the struggle was about having these— really part of it was about the porousness of boundaries, right. But the other part was about a certain rigidness that I think is is most apparent in the way I was treated by the American psychiatric complex, where I was told, this is your diagnosis. This is the life that that diagnosis implies, you know, these are the meds you’ll be on the rest of your life. I wanted to free myself from that rigidness because there are certain labels that are really helpful. There are certain words that are really helpful. And then there are certain word words that are really destructive. And it’s finding the language that uplifts me and can uplift other people.

And there has been such a shift in I think the way the general public responds to mental health. I think there is so much less stigma than there used to be. There’s so much more openness, but I think unfortunately and especially for young women, there is also a romanticization of mental health and struggle that can be so harming when you are a teenager and you know find The Bell Jar for the first time.

which is one of the books, it’s funny you mentioned that because in my little overnight bag when I went when I committed myself to the locked ward when I was 18, the books in my bag were The Bell Jar and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. So I was glamorizing my own experience as I was living it, and almost not living.

I think it also causes people to be dismissive of it, when it is so important to make sure that we are treating things with seriousness with intention, with kindness, with compassion for any person, no matter what they may be struggling through, because I think so many people would say, Well, you may have been coming from certain places of privilege or having these certain experiences, but that that doesn’t take away from the openness that you bring, and say, with your story. Here it is, and here is the actual lived experience.

I think it’s, I appreciate you bringing up the privilege because I’m the first to admit, I had the luxury of being mentally ill for 10 years, and not becoming homeless, not losing everything. So there’s that I also was able to not only do my art, but use my art to cure myself. And that is a luxury that most people don’t have. So I acknowledged that, from the depths of my being. It’s one of those things of examples of many things being true. At the same time, there was a lot of abundance, there was abundance, and there was absence, there was privilege, and there was, you know, agony and deprivation of certain kinds. So yeah, again, many things being true at the same time.

I think that that is something when you put it in that sort of context. I mean, you do not pull punches in this book with describing your parents describing other people that you encountered your you will challenge the reader to sort of keep up with you. Because even when you are describing things in certain ways that would make most people say, Well, I would just not have a relationship with that person, you know, I would be done. And you come back and say, well, there’s more. There’s more to understand. And though I think that that’s sort of coming at it from an outside perspective, because that’s obviously not the way you frame it as you’re living it in that moment. But I think you’ll challenge readers to understand more than is their gut reaction when they first meet some of these people in your life.

I love that. Thank you for saying that. And I think I also don’t pull punches with myself, you know, I hope that I don’t let myself off the hook because I behaved in in many ways that I’m not happy about. And I’m, everybody’s the hero of their own story. And everybody’s going through challenges and complicated, extenuating situations. And I really, I think you’re absolutely right, there’s always more to understand. And what was empowering for me, is deciding that I wanted to take that journey with all of the people in my life,

And it takes bravery, it takes compassion, it takes a little bit of, I don’t know, I don’t know if I could ever do it. That sort of mentality when you’re reading along of like, I don’t know how you make this choice. Did you ever Okay, here’s my question that sometimes I ask of this is, did you ever think about writing it as like a novel and just saying, like, this isn’t real? I’m just writing a fiction book.

Well, it’s funny, you asked that because, I mean, it’s no but so I, I was in a treatment center, where I was being subjected to a similar kind of brainwashing as my mom experienced in her, quote, unquote, therapeutic relationships. And I was supposed to write a trauma form, and I wrote, and I had an a life story, and I wrote it in the third person, and I kind of failed therapy that day, but I thought, Okay, this is a compelling story, but it needed to be, it just needed to be it needed to be exactly how it turned out. And I think being as dissociated as I am, it feels like I’m telling it in the third person emotionally. So I think I needed that immediacy, to almost introduce myself to myself.

That’s a very interesting sort of spin on again, it’s like I almost want to go back and read this again now after you know after I speak to you to like get a different perspective on it yet. But I think that there’s so much value in putting out things that some people would say that sort of, you know, I wouldn’t have been able to write that I wouldn’t have been able to put that out there for other people. Because there is I think we owe it to ourselves, to be honest with our own stories, and to be proud of our own stories, even when they are challenging even when they are uncomfortable. Do you have a response to people that would say, I would have just hidden that away, and I wouldn’t have put it out.

So funny, because I sort of didn’t realize what I had done until it was too late. And now it’s out and I’m going, Oh, my God, what have I done, but it never occurred to me that I could say anything, but everything. I almost felt like it wasn’t allowed. And I don’t know where that impulse comes from. But I’m glad that I wasn’t distracted by worrying about what others might think. I’m also just somebody who over shares. I mean, it’s an overshare, wrapped in a poem. And it’s not like I was going to turn my personality off to tell my life story, it should be the opposite. I mean, if I was going to tell this authentically, it needed to be told by me and who I am as somebody who has no boundaries, over shares. And maybe it’s, and that’s honestly part of what that quality was part of what saved my relationships. It’s what brought me back to my dad, it was only because we could say everything to each other that we could say, all the things we needed to. And part of what made up the bad in the relationship was lack of boundaries. But then, on the other hand, it’s that diffuse identity that made me able to understand the people in my life and understand myself. And that’s what I’ve learned through this process is also finding the opportunity in the things that feel totally hopeless, whether it’s my mother’s dementia, whether it’s the dissociative experience, I have found innumerable gifts nestled in the heart of those curses.

And this book wouldn’t work if there was an incredible balance. If this was just a traumatic thing after traumatic thing and with no understanding for those beautiful moments. It wouldn’t be something anyone could, you know, make it through without crying, or dissociating. But there is so much balance in this book, there are so many beautiful moments that you include, and the voice is so strong, even though I think that so much of it felt like find you finding your voice, your writing this, I love that. And it was such a journey to go along with. But you did find that point in between of yes, there are dark moments, but there is also so much light in this book.

I’m really happy that you came away from it was that that was really important to me.

And as I was reading it, I told you before we started recording that I read this pretty much in one sitting. And because I have to when I start something, and when I’m in that feeling in that moment, I just have to finish it. I have to know the whole thing.

You should get a medal because that’s an extreme sport to read this book.

It felt like an extreme sport. And yet I couldn’t stop. I knew I was like, well, I could give myself a break. But why would I when there was more than I needed to know. But I did come away with it. feeling hopeful and feeling like the I both physically and metaphorically close the book, and I felt good about it at the end.

I’m so happy to hear that. You do.

24:11

And that’s I hope that writing it. I was going to say as you finished and as you you know, ended this writing process. Does it feel like there’s closure like there is sort of an end to that chapter at least?

Yes. I think I sort of have defanged a lot of, all of my history. It. It doesn’t, you know, doesn’t haunt me as much, to use a cliche, and it’s also I mean, it continues to live its message. I mean, I am sort of drained of any kind of adolescent anger. My relationship with my father again, this book has given us tremendous, it’s given us tools, it’s given us, you know, whenever I visit him, he wakes up every morning and we have our green tea on the table and we process and we talk about all of our regrets. And I got the opportunity to turn my regrets and my struggles into something that’s hopefully going to help other people and something that’s hopefully beautiful. So they’re not regrets anymore. It’s and that’s a kind of alchemy that I feel really grateful that I get to participate in. And I try and help, for instance, my father with that, or my other family members, who are struggling with hearing the story. And that’s such a gift. And then it’s also brought me even closer to my husband. I mean, the way we edited this book was I read the entire book out loud, seven times. And he would pace back and forth. And then they’ll go, Wait, what are you trying to say? And then we yell sentences at each other until one of us goes, Oh, that’s it, and then we high five. So every part of this book facilitated something really special. And I know it’s not going to only be sunshine and rainbows, some people will not have positive reactions to it. But that’s there’s something I’ll have to deal with or dissociate my way through.

I love hearing about your sort of editing and collaboration process, because obviously, this book has been rattling around inside of you and on, you know, in varying forms for a long time in your life. This is a long time coming for a project, as you’re working through those, like craft level pieces. Are there still sentences in there that you wrote as like a teenager? Or is this like a wholly new entity?

That’s a great question. Um, I think there are artifacts in there, for sure. And that that excites me, because the one of the few things that penetrates the dissociation is little Alice, who lives in here. And whenever I need to ground myself or feel really feel what’s happening and spark gratitude, I talk to little Alice and I tell her everything that’s happening and how people are responding to the book. And then I got to write a book that people are going to read the book and it’s going to be on shelves and frickin Barnes and Noble. I mean, I get choked up whenever I do it. So it really thrills me that there might be little glints of actual words that you know, little Alice, medium Alice and big Alice wrote throughout this process. So it’s an exciting little time capsule that I get to show off to little Alice.

One of my favorite pieces that started with little Alice that I imagine is still a piece of advice today is your love for audiobooks that goes through this this story. It sort of hits you right at the beginning, when you start that you listen to a lot of audiobooks. And you read the audiobook for this. Was it sort of a full circle moment to get to record did you use your years of listening and training in those moments?

Yes, that my patron saint LeVar Burton was watching over me, he narrated my favorite my all-time favorite children’s young adult book The Watsons Go to Birmingham 1963, which I think has the most exquisite, nuanced rumination on trauma and depiction of trauma I’ve ever seen in a book and the audio recording the audio book. I’m so glad you brought it up because I’m still reeling from it. It was so magical. And it’s so funny because I got to record also that part that’s you know, Spiegel and Grau presents Everything/Nothing/Someone a memoir by Alice Carrière, narrated by Alice Carrière, and that was because I had just heard those intros my whole life. And, and then I’m, you know, listening to it in my headphones, and I started crying. I couldn’t, I couldn’t just that intro, you know, the most sort of dry and emotional parts of, of the recording process. Were just so magical. And so moving. You know, Gregory was just sitting five hours a day watching me in the isolation booth just to support me. So that was unbelievably moving. And I just, I hope I did a good job and I hope people, people respond to it.

I am sure with your years of listening and your attention to detail that you would describe how you would pay attention to the pauses and the sort of inflections that there’s no way that that didn’t seep in and osmosis into the way that you read this.

I hope so. And you know, I still listen to those audiobooks. I do relisten to Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. A couple months ago, I listened to The Watsons Go to Birmingham every year, and then The Giver by Lois Lowry. And it’s interesting because I know you might ask me later because you ask everybody what their influences are. And it’s, you know, these are the most formative books for me, because I find in my adulthood, what I like keeps changing. But I keep coming back to these books. And in The Giver, it opens with Jonas, struggling to find the right word for something. And there is this import and the majesty and the magic that this process is imbued with. I could feel it even as a five-year-old, you know, he’s trying to describe this feeling that’s inside him. And he’s like, No, that’s the wrong word. That’s the wrong word. And I think he lands on apprehensive, I’m not sure I have to listen to it again. But that was really powerful for me to hear that focus on the precision of language and how important it is. And what a journey and what a skill and what, what a process it is of finding the right word for the things inside of us and that stuck with me.

I mean, The Giver is probably one of my most formative books of all time. So, I’m with you there. I think I had a copy when I was a kid, and I read it so much the pages fell out. Because yeah, it’s just a masterpiece.

Yeah, it is an incredible book. And I think and Ron Rifkin does a great job narrating and the audio.

And the idea of words, having power, our own words, having power is so important. I think in this time that we live in where words can be taken out of context so incredibly easily. Our words are very free. And you know, with social media with what we put out into the universe, it is very important. And so yes, I start I’m struggling even to find the right word, because I want to put the gravity behind it of do we put things out into the world with intention now? Yes. And I think that a story like this, a story like yours is so intentional, and it is so directed at achieving certain goals. And in my opinion, it certainly does, because I could not put it down. But understanding that connectivity, that act of communion that can come when you find a book that speaks to you, in this world, where there is constant information and constant availability of story, and access to people. It’s really something to behold.

Thank you so much. And I even in your description of this, you know, frenzied frenetic world of information. I mean, I’m so happy that you could land in the book, because I have a really hard time with the screens with the information of really landing in myself in a moment in a book. And it just makes me so happy that this book did it for you. When the words are good, I’ll be there. Oh, yes, go. Good words.

Like you alluded to, I always ask about influences. Is there any other sort of big influence that you want to put out there anything that really speaks to you, or anything you’ve read recently,

Along with the children’s books, the audiobooks, I think what was really influential were depictions of the dissociative experience in literature, and there aren’t many. So there are Sartre, La Nausée. And then, for me, a really important book was The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector, and it’s about 177 pages. And it’s entirely about a woman thinking about killing a cockroach thinking about her own thinking. And it’s the most accurate rendering of the dissociative experience I’ve ever read. And it’s interesting because it’s called, you know, on Wikipedia, or wherever it’s called a mystical book. And it’s so interesting to me, because I’ve been at the center of a dissociative experience. To me, it’s realism. I mean, it’s really realistic, but to people who are outside of that experience, it may sound like mysticism. And I think that touches on something that I really want. I hope readers can come away with is that I would like people who are in the dissociative experience, to find that it’s been articulated, and people outside of the dissociative experience to feel that they have understood it. And I remember when I was in the locked ward, and I was having a dissociative episode, I had crawled under the sink, I was banging my head against the wall, screaming my own name, and my address and my telephone number. And a nurse walked in. And she said, what’s going on? And I described this experience, and she said, Oh, it sounds like you’re dissociating. And I had never heard that word in my life. But for the first time, I felt like I wasn’t falling through infinite space. And I then, because I had that word as a beacon, I could find these resources, I could read The Passion According to G.H. I could read Octavia Butler’s short story, “The Morning, Evening, and the Night” where people with a dissociative disorder literally want to literally dig themselves out of their own bodies, which is exactly how I feel, and exactly how I felt. And that was really life changing for me. And so if this book can do what those books did, what that word did in that moment, I will be happy. And then the other things I love are poets who write prose, whether it’s Rilke, whether it’s Ocean Vuong, whether it’s Patricia Lockwood, the, the language comes first attitude, is is irresistible to me. So those and then ever I mean, I’m a voracious reader, but I don’t like to shout things out until maybe three years after I’ve read them, because then I told them, I my opinion changes all the time.

And that’s why The Giver is safe. Because it’s in the canon, it’s in the canon. But I think that of all the things you’ve described, this book will absolutely fit in with all of the sort of language first. writers out there, like I said, this the sentences, the words you choose, the carefulness with, which I think you’ve created, this will really take this into a new level of memoir. I can’t stop talking about this book. I love. I love it.

Oh, my gosh, you’re my favorite. I thank you. I can’t I just can’t believe I’m just so stunned and grateful. Wow.

And I think that, for anybody who is on the fence that might be sort of nervous about the intensity of this book. I think that reminding I mean, the balance is so well done that even in those moments where it sort of stops up your heart of like, I can’t, I can’t imagine pushing forward, I can’t imagine going, you know, you’re here, you survived this, you wrote your survival into an incredible memoir, and I think readers will really be able to come away with it with an understanding. And I think that that’s the most important piece that there will be understanding from this book.

I mean, I hope so. And I, I love that you said that because it really is. I mean, there were so many times where I just thought the good stuff wouldn’t come and I relate so strongly to that heartstopping breathtaking moment of I can’t, I can’t push through this, whether it’s a book or whether it’s lived life. And the good stuff comes and I’m so glad that I stuck around to see that. And I hope that I hope it inspires other people to do that. And I’m fjust really excited to share it.

And I’m really excited for people to get to read it. Everything/Nothing/Someone it is truly something to behold. Alice, thank you so much for being here with us today. The book is out now. I can’t wait for people to get their hands on it.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I’m so happy and happy reading everyone.

Poured Over