Everything/Nothing/Someone: A Memoir

by Alice Carrière

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A memoir that electrifies as it slams us headlong into a collision of wealth, fame, parenting and therapy failures, hard-wrought salvation and reconciliation. Carriere’s writing — searing, tender, knowing — makes it impossible to look away, impossible to put down. For readers riveted by Girl Interrupted, Brain on Fire or I’m Glad My Mom Died, or those who simply relish a greatly told life, don’t miss out.

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

A “remarkable” (New York Times Book Review) memoir that tells of a young woman’s coming-of-age amid glamour, excess, and neglect, and the love affair that, against the odds, allows her to save herself.

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-13:	9781954118294
Publisher:	Spiegel & Grau
Publication date:	08/29/2023
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	42,407
Product dimensions:	9.20(w) x 6.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Alice Carrière is a graduate of Columbia University. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, and Oprah Daily. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, and Amagansett, New York. Everything/Nothing/Someone is her first book. 

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/08/2023

Carrière’s urgent, visceral debut traces the roots of her struggles with dissociative disorder to the poor boundaries of her childhood. The only child of internationally acclaimed American artist Jennifer Bartlett and German actor Mathieu Carrière, Alice was rocked by her parents’ contentious divorce proceedings, which lasted for six years while she was young. Her emotionally unavailable mother left Alice’s care to paid helpers; later, her father’s transgressive sexual anarchism encouraged Alice’s sexual behavior with his friends. A reciprocal, loving relationship with a teenage boyfriend introduced the author to normal family life, but she couldn’t comprehend healthy relationships free of trauma. Eventually, Carrière lost her grip on her physical self and succumbed to her dissociative disorder: “I was traumatized not by an external event that my mind was trying to escape, but by the experience of my mind escaping itself,” she writes. After suffering medication-induced psychosis while seeking reprieve from the condition and enduring fruitless psychiatric holds, Alice finds purpose in a budding relationship with a fellow recovering addict, who helps anchor her. Carrière’s surgically precise prose compresses her broken-glass experiences into hard diamond truths about family trauma and the mental health industry. This brutal, illuminating account reads like a contemporary Girl, Interrupted. Agent: Kimberly Witherspoon, InkWell Management. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Carrière’s surgically precise prose compresses her broken-glass experiences into hard diamond truths about family trauma and the mental health industry. This brutal, illuminating account reads like a contemporary Girl, Interrupted.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“I don’t know which is more stunning: the triumph of this life, or the triumph of this beautiful book. Or perhaps they are one and the same. Out of the ashes of a childhood that may have appeared shiny on its surface but was unnerving and profoundly lonely, Alice Carrière has made art. Everything/Nothing/Someone is a master class in memoir.”—Dani Shapiro, author of the New York Times bestseller Inheritance

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

“Propulsive, intense, moving, and breathtakingly honest, this searing memoir about family ties, trampled boundaries, and mental illness is completely unforgettable. What a writer!”—Molly Shannon, author of the New York Times bestseller Hello, Molly!

“This unsparing memoir reveals Alice Carrière’s extraordinary courage, her brilliance, her willingness to forgive, and her understanding that you hold your life on the condition that you will struggle hard in your search for an unmistakable self.”—Susanna Moore, author of Miss Aluminum 

“I read this brilliant book in one mad gulp. The prose is like a fever dream; Alice Carrière is an amazing writer. What a story—from start to finish.”—Kate Christensen, PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of The Great Man

From the Publisher

★ 2023-05-03
A memoir of mental illness from the daughter of actor Mathieu Carrière and artist Jennifer Bartlett.

Alice Carrière’s childhood was underscored by the wealth, power, and notoriety of her parents along with the idiosyncrasies and aloofness that these markers often confer. In her literary debut, she establishes the push and pull of her mother, father, and beloved Nanny, “the British governess paid to raise me,” a motherly figure “who could be fired and disappear at any moment.” Each struggled with their own backgrounds of trauma, from indoctrination in perverse cultural movements to up-close encounters with suicide. The inheritance of these scars—and the attendant distance and inappropriateness—contributed to the author’s mental illness, which included self-harm, first inflicted at age 7. “With a tiny, shiny blade I learned I could unlock a doorway that led to a place that was entirely my own, even if I could only stay there for a moment within those seconds of pain,” she recalls. Throughout this visceral text, the author propels readers forward with the gut-wrenching descriptions of her struggles and how they were exacerbated by the lack of a recognizable support system. Meanwhile, she artfully establishes an equally disturbing undercurrent: the sucker punch of egregious malpractice to which she was subjected by a series of doctors who overprescribed a number of powerful drugs and mismanaged therapy sessions. It can be difficult to ignore the advantages of Carrière’s privilege—e.g., lengthy stays at expensive inpatient facilities, the ability to drop in and out of elite universities—but her artistic prowess and determination to unearth and interpret the true narrative arc of her life and healing shine through. “Things only became real when they were turned into language,” she writes, and “that language was often the only thing left when that reality fell apart.” This book is the exemplification of that ideal, rendering real and poignant her experience—both material and interior—in stunning prose.

A spellbinding memoir.

Kirkus Reviews