Everything/Nothing/Someone: A Memoir

(Paperback)

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This celebrated memoir, one of the most notable literary debuts of 2023 tells of a young womans coming-of-age in the bohemian 90s, as her adolescence gives way to a struggle with dissociative disorder.

Alice Carrire tells the story of her unconventional upbringing in Greenwich Village as the daughter of a remote mother, the renowned artistJennifer Bartlett,and a charismatic father, European actorMathieu Carrire. From an early age, Alice is forced to navigate her mothers recovered memories of ritualised sexual abuse, which she turns into art, and her fathers confusing attentions. Her days are a mixture of privilege, neglect, loneliness, and danger a child living in an adults world, with little-to-no enforcement of boundaries or supervision.

When she enters adolescence, 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 menricocheting from experience to experience untila medication-induced psychosis brings these personas crashing down. Eventually, she finds purpose in caring for her mother as she descends into dementia, 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 humour and brutal honesty,Everything/Nothing/Someoneexplores 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 mesmerising narrative of emergence and, finally, cure.

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

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

Reviews

Extraordinary.Sarah Jessica Parker

The writing is pure elegance.Lisa Taddeo

Mind-blowing!Lena Dunham

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 authors experience of inheriting their prodigious legacy. . . . Raw, filled with sorrow, dark humor and sharp observation.New York TimesBook Review

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

Extraordinary, relatable, beautiful . . . The do-or-die question of memoirdo we careis answered in the form of a direct pipeline to the reader's heart.Minneapolis Star Tribune

Everything/Nothing/Someonewill stay in your mind for a long time.Real Simple

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

Wild, dark, riveting . . .Everything/Nothing/Someoneis held together, even elevated, by the force of Carrires honesty, which lives in her prose.Chapter 16

Spare and direct, with flashes of Didionesque elegance . . . The writing of this book and the presentation of Carrires life is brutal and honest and funny and shocking. . . . One of the most compelling first-person memoirs Ive read in a long time.Bret Easton Ellis,Bret Easton Ellis Podcast

Creatively exceptional . . . This isnt only about Carrires life. Its also about how people make art and build family, how philosophy . . . intersects with lived experience, and how people try and fail to connect.Booklist(starred review)

Carrires 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 contemporaryGirl, Interrupted.Publishers Weekly(starred review)

A spellbinding memoir.Kirkus(starred review)

I dont 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 Carrire has made art.Everything/Nothing/Someoneis a master class in memoir.Dani Shapiro, New York Timesbestselling author of Inheritance

Propulsive, intense, moving, and breathtakingly honest, this searing memoir about family ties, trampled boundaries, and mental illness is completely unforgettable. What a writer!Molly Shannon, New York Timesbestselling author of Hello, Molly!

This unsparing memoir reveals Alice Carrires 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.Susanna Moore, author of Miss Aluminum

I read this brilliant book in one mad gulp. The prose is like a fever dream; Alice Carrire is an amazing writer. What a storyfrom start to finish.Kate Christensen, PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author ofThe Great Man

Author Bio

Alice Carrire is a graduate of Columbia University. Everything/Nothing/Someone is her first book.She lives inNashville, Tennessee, and Amagansett, New York.