No One Gets to Fall Apart: A Memoir
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.
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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.
A New York Times "Editor's Pick" * An Essence "Most Anticipated" * 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" * A Platform Mag "Debut Novel to Read" --
"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
"Urgent and imaginative... No One Gets to Fall Apart makes for an engrossing read, its hectic scenes held together by a psychically unmoored narrator whose wit and honesty make us trust her anyway."
-- New York Times Book Review
"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
"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
"[An] unforgettable memoir... Deeply intelligent and unashamedly real." -- Oprah Daily
"Extraordinary... LaBrie brings a piercing astuteness and sensitive voice to the dilemma raised by the writer's desire to tell a story."
-- Los Angeles Times
"Introspective and vulnerable... The willingness to nakedly share this healing and her struggles are exactly what make the book so alluring, and [LaBrie's] utter honesty is the strongest part of her work."
-- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"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
"LaBrie's intimate and vivid chronicle is haunting in its sorrow and beautiful in its daring and hope." -- Booklist
"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
"This memoir was an eye-opening account of mental illness and family dynamics. LaBrie allows readers into deeply personal moments while shedding light on more widespread themes that stem from her family's past as well as LaBrie's own creative drive." -- Debutiful, "10 noteworthy debut books"
"With remarkable insight and frankness, TV writer and librettist Sarah LaBrie mines her family history of mental illness in her ambitious debut memoir... No One Gets to Fall Apart examines family dynamics, mental health, Blackness, literature, friendship, the #MeToo movement and more as LaBrie illustrates her desire to embrace her own emotions, even as the temptation to suppress them looms." -- BookPage
