Everything/Nothing/Someone: A Memoir by Alice Carriere
This celebrated memoir, one of the most notable literary debuts of 2023 tells of a young woman's coming-of-age in the bohemian '90s, as her adolescence gives way to a struggle with dissociative disorder.
Alice Carriere 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 Carriere. From an early age, Alice is forced to navigate her mother's recovered memories of ritualised 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 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. 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/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 mesmerising narrative of emergence and, finally, cure.
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Format: Paperback | 288 pages
Dimensions (cm):Â 21.5 x 13.7 x 2 | 328g
Publication Date: 23 Apr 2024
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Imprint: Allen & Unwin
Publication City/Country: London, United Kingdom
Language: English
ISBN10: 1805462431
ISBN13: 9781805462439
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Condition: Good
A book that has been read but is in good condition. Very minimal damage to the cover including a single thin crease on the top-edge of the front cover, but no holes or tears. The majority of pages are undamaged with no creasing or tearing, no pencil underlining of text, and no highlighting of text. The last page in the book (blank page) has a bunch of writing in blue pen, but no other writing in margins. No missing pages.