Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Maren Wiederhold
Categories

EVERYTHING/NOTHING/SOMEONE

Alice Carrière

A Memoir

A powerful literary debut of a young woman's coming-of-age in the bohemian '90s, as her adolescence gives way to a struggle with dissociative disorder.
Alice Carrière tells the story of her unconventional upbringing in Greenwich Village as the daughter of a remote mother, the renowned artist Jennifer Bartlett, and a charismatic father, European actor Mathieu Carrière. From an early age, Alice is forced to navigate her mother's recovered memories of ritualized sexual abuse, which she turns into art, and her father's confusing attentions. Her days are a mixture of privilege, neglect, loneliness, and danger - a child living in an adult's world, with little-to-no enforcement of boundaries or supervision. When she enters adolescence, Alice begins to lose her grasp on herself, as a dissociative disorder erases her identity and overzealous doctors medicate her further away from herself. She inhabits various roles: as a patient in expensive psychiatric hospitals, a denizen of the downtown New York music scene, the ingenue in destructive encounters with older menricocheting from experience to experience until a medication-induced psychosis brings these personas crashing down. Eventually, she finds purpose in caring for her Alzheimer's-afflicted mother, in a love affair with a recovering addict who steadies her, in confronting her father whose words and actions splintered her, and in finding her voice as a writer. With gallows humor and brutal honesty, Everything Nothing Someone explores what it means for our body and mind to belong to us wholly, irrevocably, and on our own terms. In pulsing, energetic prose that is both precise and probing, Alice manages to untangle the stories told to her by her parents, the American psychiatric complex, and her own broken mind to craft a unique and mesmerizing narrative of emergence and, finally, cure. Alice Carrière is a graduate of Columbia University. This is her first book. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, and Amagansett, New York.
Available products
Book

Published 2023-08-29 by Spiegel & Grau

Comments

This unsparing memoir reveals Alice Carrière's extraordinary courage, her brilliance, her willingness to forgive, and her understanding that you hold your life on the condition that you will struggle hard in your search for an unmistakable self.

Alice Carrière's memoir tackles the dissonance between memory and mental health Read more...

I don't know which is more stunning: the triumph of this life, or the triumph of this beautiful book. Or perhaps they are one and the same. Out of the ashes of a childhood that may have appeared shiny on its surface but was unnerving and profoundly lonely, Alice Carrière has made art. Everything/Nothing/Someone is a master class in memoir.

Excerpt: My Mother the Creator Read more...

In this raw and remarkable debut, the daughter of the American conceptual artist Jennifer Bartlett and the German actor Mathieu Carrière traces her privileged but troubled coming-of-age in New York and Paris, and her adolescent decline into depression and dissociative disorder. Read more...

Told with a visceral candor and in heartbreaking detail, Everything/Nothing/Someone will stay in your mind for a long time.

Allen & Unwin/Atlantic Books: Australia Flammarion: France

... exemplification of that ideal, rendering real and poignant her experience - both material and interior - in stunning prose. A spellbinding memoir. Read more...

In her pulsing memoir, Carriére carefully considers how the circumstances of her childhood... shaped her precociousness, her fragile mental health and overmedication, and her survival... Her first book is, indeed, creatively exceptional.

Propulsive, intense, moving, and breathtakingly honest, this searing memoir about family ties, trampled boundaries, and mental illness is completely unforgettable. What a writer!

NPR's Ailsa Chang talks with writer Alice Carriere about her debut novel, Everything/Nothing/Someone. Read more...

I read this brilliant book in one mad gulp. The prose is like a fever dream; Alice Carrière is an amazing writer. What a story - from start to finish.

Kirkus' Best of Nonfiction 2023 list

'Everything Nothing Someone' is an extraordinary, relatable, beautiful memoir Read more...

An intense but finely written book in the manner of classic coming-of-age memoirs like The Bell Jar.

Carrière's surgically precise prose compresses her broken-glass experiences into hard diamond truths about family trauma and the mental health industry. This brutal, illuminating account reads like a contemporary Girl, Interrupted. Read more...