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 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 Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother, 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.
Photo by Jamie Diamond
Alice Carrière is a graduate of Columbia University. This is her first book. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, and Amagansett, New York.
“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
“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
“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)
“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
“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