Everything/Nothing/Someone: A Memoir
New York Times Editor's Choice * Indie Next Pick * Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction 2023 * Kirkus Best Nonfiction 2023 *Amazon Best of the Month * B&N Most Anticipated * Jennette McCurdy Book Club Pick
A "remarkable" (New York Times Book Review) memoir that tells of a young woman's coming-of-age amid glamour, excess, and neglect, and the love affair that, against the odds, allows her to save herself.
Alice Carrière grew up in a converted factory in Greenwich Village in the 1990s, an extravagant home based on the hyper-aestheticized vision of her artist mother, Jennifer Bartlett--with two studios, an indoor swimming pool, a rooftop garden with a koi pond, and multiple, cavernous rooms through which a steady stream of visitors flowed. Alice's iconoclastic European father was a fleeting, atmospheric disturbance.
Alice grows up as a child living in an adult's world, with little-to-no boundaries or supervision. As she enters adolescence, a dissociative disorder erases her identity, and overzealous doctors medicate her further into madness. In the absence of self, she inhabits various roles: as a patient in expensive psychiatric hospitals, the ingenue in destructive encounters with older men, a provocateur who weaponizes intellectual dazzle and outrageous candor--until a medication-induced psychosis brings these personas crashing down. Finally, a soulful connection with a generous and sensitive musician allows her to free herself from the pathologies that defined her and recognize her true self. With gallows humor and brutal honesty, Carrière has written a unique and mesmerizing narrative of emergence and, at last, cure.
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"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 "Extraordinary, relatable, beautiful . . . The do-or-die question of memoir--do we care?--is answered in the form of a direct pipeline to the reader's heart."--Minneapolis Star Tribune "Everything/Nothing/Someone will 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/Someone is held together, even elevated, by the force of Carrière's 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 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 "Creatively exceptional . . . This isn't only about Carrière's life. It's 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) "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."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) "A spellbinding memoir."--Kirkus (starred review) "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."--Dani Shapiro, author of the New York Times bestseller 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, author of the New York Times bestseller Hello, Molly! "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."--Susanna Moore, author of Miss Aluminum
"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."--Kate Christensen, PEN/Faulkner award-winning author of The Great Man
