Compared to Girl, Interrupted, this "remarkable" (New York Times) memoir and love story, one of the most notable literary debuts of 2023, tells of a young woman's harrowing coming-of-age amid glamour, excess, and neglect,and her journey, against the odds, to find herself.
GIRL, INTERRUPTED FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
'Spellbinding' - JENNETTE MCCURDY
'It's extraordinary... make your way to this book.' - SARAH JESSICA PARKER
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. 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.
Alice begins to lose her grasp on reality 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 men-ricocheting from experience to experience until a medication-induced psychosis brings these personas crashing down.
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.
Remarkable . . . A timeless tale of surviving emotional neglect and mental illness; but it is also the story of a singular household filled with complex and exceptional artists, and the author's experience of inheriting their prodigious legacy. . . . Raw, filled with sorrow, dark humor and sharp observation. New York Times Book Review
An intense but finely written book in the manner of classic coming-of-age memoirs like The Bell Jar. Vogue
A story of immense bravery and resilience. It is clear, too, that this book was written by an exceptional human being, one with a remarkable capacity for forgiveness and a keen ability to see 'love hidden in the heart of our failings and misfortunes. Washington Post
Spare and direct, with flashes of Didionesque elegance . . . The writing of this book and the presentation of Carrière's life is brutal and honest and funny and shocking. . . . One of the most compelling first-person memoirs I've read in a long time. -- Bret Easton Ellis Bret Easton Ellis Podcast
Takes a lot of courage to write an autobiography of your abusive childhood, but to do so elegantly with humor and compassion is extraordinary. Alice manages to tell her story with insight and forgiveness for her parents and herself, and we root for them all, all the way. -- Susan Sarandon
The story is extraordinary, but more importantly, the storytelling is exceptional... If you read one memoir this year, make it this one -- Pandora Sykes
An impressive feat of writing, and a dark insight into life among the overprivileged. The Daily Telegraph
I did love it and spent a feverish few days devouring it with a mixture of anguish and awe... The only thing it's making me feel is so sad that I didn't have this to read all those years ago. That I didn't have one thing to reassure me that others had experienced what I was going through and made it out alive. I think things would've been so much easier. -- Sophie White Irish Independent
Alice Carrière is a graduate of Columbia University. This is her first book. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, and Amagansett, New York.
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