Everything/Nothing/Someone
On behalf of: Spiegel & Grau
Like Girl, Interrupted and Prozac Nation, a powerful literary debut of a young woman’s coming of age in the bohemian ’90s, as her adolescence gives way to a struggle with dissociative disorder.
Alice Carrière tells the story of her unconventional upbringing in Greenwich Village as the daughter of a remote mother, the renowned painter 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 Satanic 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.
As she enters adolescence, Alice tries to make sense of the world as a dissociative disorder erases her identity and manic episodes erase her reality. She looks for meaning and self in myriad—as a patient in expensive psychiatric hospitals, as a wild child in the downtown NYC music scene, as a truth-seeker in a well-intentioned but destructive trauma group. Eventually she finds purpose in caring for her Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother and the aging Nanny who raised her; in a love affair with a recovering addict whose own hard-won victories steady her; and in confronting her father whose words and actions splintered her.
With gallows humor and brutal honesty, Everything/Nothing/Someone explores female selfhood and all the ways the body and mind are carved up to serve the needs and wants of others. 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.
Reviews
“Remarkable debut memoir… It is also refreshing to read a memoir of dysfunctional family and psychological disorder that is not self-pitying but raw, filled with sorrow, dark humor and sharp observation. ” — Jennifer Clement, The New York Times
“Spare and direct, with flashes of Didionesque elegance.” — Bret Easton Ellis, Bret Easton Ellis Podcast
“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
“A spellbinding memoir.” — Kirkus, starred review
“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
“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