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A Memoir
by Sarah LaBrie
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.
"[A] spellbinding debut.... With unflinching honesty ('I am so terribly sick of cannibalizing my life for art') and lyrical prose, LaBrie elegantly captures the grunt work of self-acceptance." —Publishers Weekly
"A memoir that faces failure head-on....[LaBrie] does a remarkable job presenting the ways in which our health care system has failed the women in her family...A bracing look at a writer's troubled past." —Kirkus Reviews
"[An] unforgettable memoir… Deeply intelligent and unashamedly real." —Oprah Daily
"LaBrie's intimate and vivid chronicle is haunting in its sorrow and beautiful in its daring and hope." —Booklist
"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
"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
This information about No One Gets to Fall Apart was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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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