A Lit Hub's "Most Anticipated" * An Oprah Daily "Best Book of Fall" * An Esquire "Best Memoir of the Year" * A San Francisco Chronicle "New Book for a Season of Change" * A Zibby Owens "Most Anticipated"
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.
BIO
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.
REVIEWS
"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
"This is a brilliant memoir about what we inherit and what we create; what disappears and what remains. Full of intelligence and rueful humor, No One Gets to Fall Apart is a triumph of every kind of literary perseverance." -- Lorrie Moore, author of I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
"No One Gets to Fall Apart is a sensitive and courageous debut by a talented writer seeking a deeper understanding of herself and her past." -- Nicole Chung, for Esquire
“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
"[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
[H] Harper / October 22, 2024
1.0" H x 8.4" L x 5.5" W (0.65 lbs) 224 pages