Overview

In this poignant memoir, as candid and indelible as The Glass Castle and Memorial Drive, a writer reflects on the love and resilience that bond her to her family in Houston and the painful reality of what it means to leave home. On a highway in Houston, Texas, Sarah LaBrie's mother was found screaming at passing cars, terrified that she would be murdered by invisible assailants. The incident forced Sarah, then attempting to build a life as a writer in Los Angeles, to face an undeniable truth: her mother, who had raised Sarah on her own, was in the midst of a schizophrenic break. That gut-wrenching acknowledgement compelled Sarah to rethink her fraught childhood, marked by her mother's self-destructive behavior and quick turns to rage, and her relationship to her own ambition in adulthood, which felt as dark and all-consuming as it did necessary to her survival. In this beautiful and observant memoir, Sarah reckons with the gravity of her mother's illness and her desire to see her get better with her equally strong desire to escape her orbit for good. In doing so, she pieces together disparate elements of her life including a decades-long fixation on a novel she can't finish but also can't abandon, her complicated feelings about her white partner and her own Blackness, a close friendship colored by betrayal, and her need to parent herself in the absence of a beloved, but troubled caretaker. Urgent, honest and self-aware, No One Gets to Fall Apart is an unflinching chronicle of familial reconciliation amid the chaos of creative striving.

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Sarah LaBrie was born in Oakland and grew up in Third Ward in Houston, Texas. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, Ucross, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and has written for several television shows. Her fiction and essays appear in Guernica, the Literary Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere. She graduated from Brown University and holds an MFA from New York University. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their two rescue dogs.

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