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In this poignant memoir, as candid and indelible as The Glass Castle and Memorial Drive , a writer reflects on the love and resilience that bond her to her family in Houston and the painful reality of what it means to leave home. On a highway in Houston, Texas, Sarah LaBrie''s mother was found screaming at passing cars, terrified that she would be murdered by invisible assailants. The incident forced Sarah, then attempting to build a life in Los Angeles, to face an undeniable truth: her mother, who had raised Sarah on her own, was currently in the midst of a schizophrenic break. That gut-wrenching acknowledgement compelled Sarah to rethink her fraught childhood, marked by her mother''s self-destructive behavior and quick turns to rage, and her relationship to her own ambition in adulthood, which felt as dark, destructive and all-consuming as it did necessary to her survival. In this beautiful and observant memoir, Sarah reckons with the gravity of her mother''s illness and her desire to see her get better with her equally strong desire to exit her orbit for good. In doing so, she pieces together the bonds that link disparate elements of her life including a decades-long fixation on a novel she can''t finish but also can''t abandon, her complicated feelings about her white partner and her own Blackness, a close friendship colored by betrayal, and her need to parent herself in the absence of a beloved, but troubled caretaker. Urgent, honest and self-aware, No One Gets to Fall Apart is an unflinching chronicle of reconciliation amid the chaos of creative striving and familial strife.
About the author
Sarah LaBrie is an author and TV writer based in Los Angeles. Her work appears in The Guardian, Guernica, Joyland, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, and other publications. Her libretti have been performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Apollo Theater, and she has written on television series including Minx, Blindspotting, Made for Love, and Love, Victor.
She has received fellowships from MacDowell, the Ucross Foundation, Yaddo, Sewanee, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and was nominated for Best Television Comedy Script at the 2024 Women’s Image Network Awards for her work on Blindspotting.
She earned her BA from Brown University in Comparative Literature and Literary Arts and an MFA from New York University as a Writers in the Schools Fellow.
Summary
Longlisted for Reading the West
A New York Times "Editor's Pick" and "Notable Book of the Year" * 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" * An NPR "Books We Love" *
“Brilliant . . . stunning . . . deserves a place alongside modern classics like Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle and Tara Westover’s Educated.” —Susannah Cahalan, New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire
“A triumph.”—Lorrie Moore, author of I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
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.
