Overview

In this poignant memoir, as candid and indelible as The Glass Castle and Memorial Drive, a writer takes on the conflict between the love that binds us to home and the desire to escape it for good. On a highway in Houston, Texas, Sarah LaBrie's mother was found screaming at passing cars, terrified she would be murdered by invisible assailants. The diagnosis of schizophrenia that followed compelled Sarah to rethink her childhood, marked at turns by violence and all-consuming closeness. Digging into the events that led to her mother's break, Sarah traces her family history of mental illness, from the dysphoria that plagued her great-grandmother, a granddaughter of slaves, to her own experience with depression as a scholarship student at Brown. At the same time, she navigates a decades-long fixation on a novel she can't finish but can't abandon, her complicated feelings about her white partner, and a fraught friendship colored by betrayal. Spanning the globe from Houston's Third Ward to Paris to Tallinn and New York to Los Angeles, No One Gets to Fall Apart is an unflinching chronicle of one woman's attempt to forge a new future through a better understanding of the past.

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9780063280724

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Reviews

"A Lit Hub's ""Most Anticipated"" -- ""I had a compulsive relationship with No One Gets to Fall Apart. Once I opened this brilliant memoir, I needed to finish it. When I wasn't reading, I was thinking about Sarah LaBrie's story, turning over in my mind her most devastating observations about motherhood, madness, and creativity. This book is stunning, one of the best memoirs I've read in a decade. No One Gets to Fall Apart deserves a place alongside modern classics like Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle and Tara Westover's Educated."" -- Susannah Cahalan, New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire and The Great Pretender ""Across this haunting, harrowing and at times rollicking account, [Sarah LaBrie] is forced in turn to frame a part, a role, a life amidst chaos. And she does so with a grace and a thoughtfulness worthy of her hero Walter Benjamin."" -- Lawrence Weschler, author of Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder ""LaBrie's spellbinding prose is a metaphysical experience: cinematic, poetic, philosophical, and wholly stunning. If psychiatric disability has impacted your life, or if you've ever been lonely, or if you enjoy having exceptional writing light up your brain, this book is an essential gift. It's that rare gem that somehow holds dazzling intertextual craft and prodigiously tender honesty in equal turn, to sublime effect. This memoir will never leave me."" -- Alissa Nutting, author of Made for Love and Tampa ""Readers will be treated to a meandering and wise discussion of the past's coloring of our futures, and how to carve the best path forward even through pain and rupture."" -- Literary Hub"

"""Across this haunting, harrowing and at times rollicking account, [Sarah LaBrie] is forced in turn to frame a part, a role, a life amidst chaos. And she does so with a grace and a thoughtfulness worthy of her hero Walter Benjamin."" -- Lawrence Weschler, author of Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder"

"""It may be true that no one gets to fall apart, but some nonetheless do, and with a vengeance, Sarah Labrie's mother certainly being one of those. Across this haunting, harrowing and at times rollicking account, her daughter is forced in turn to frame a part, a role, a life amidst all the ensuing chaos. And at length she does so, with a grace and a panache and a thoughtfulness worthy of her hero Walter Benjamin."" -- Lawrence Weschler author, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (a life of artist Robert Irwin) and And How are You, Doctor Sacks: A biographical memoir of Oliver Sacks."

Author Information

Sarah LaBrie is a writer from Houston, Texas. Her libretti have been performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall and her fiction appears in Guernica, The Literary Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She has held residencies at Yaddo, UCross and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She lives in Los Angeles where she has written for television shows including Minx (Starz), Blindspotting (Starz), Made for Love (MAX), and Love, Victor (Hulu). She holds an MFA from NYU where she was a Writers in the Schools fellow.

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