No One Gets to Fall Apart - by Sarah Labrie (Hardcover)

About the Book

"From television writer and producer Sarah LaBrie, comes a poignant memoir about the love and resilience of a mother and daughter in the midst of mental illness"--

Book Synopsis

A New York Times Notable Book

A Best Book of the Year -- NPR, Esquire, Elle

Finalist for the Writers' League of Texas Book Award

Longlisted for Reading the West

"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

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 in their complex mother-daughter relationship.

Digging into the events that led to her mother's break, Sarah traces her family history of generational trauma and 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 Black woman's attempt to forge a new future through a better understanding of the past.

Intellectually fierce and emotionally raw, this is a story of inheritance, identity, and the memories we must confront to survive.

• A Complicated Mother-Daughter Bond: Navigating a relationship defined by both "all-consuming closeness" and violence in the shadow of a devastating schizophrenia diagnosis.
• Searching for an Origin: Tracing a family history of mental illness from a great-grandmother, the granddaughter of slaves, through the author's own depression as a scholarship student at Brown.
• A Black Woman's Coming of Age: An unflinching journey from Houston's Third Ward to the Ivy League and beyond, grappling with race, class, and the struggle to write her own future.
• For Readers of Educated and The Glass Castle: A stunning literary memoir that blends intellectual rigor with raw, personal narrative to explore the ties that bind and the moments that break us.

Review Quotes

"Across this haunting, harrowing and at times rollicking account, [Sarah LaBrie] is forced in turn to frame a part, a role, a life amidst chaos. And she does so with a grace and a thoughtfulness worthy of her hero Walter Benjamin." - Lawrence Weschler, author of Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder
"I had a compulsive relationship with No One Gets to Fall Apart. Once I opened this brilliant memoir, I needed to finish it. When I wasn't reading, I was thinking about Sarah LaBrie's story, turning over in my mind her most devastating observations about motherhood, madness, and creativity. This book is stunning, one of the best memoirs I've read in a decade. No One Gets to Fall Apart deserves a place alongside modern classics like Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle and Tara Westover's Educated." - Susannah Cahalan, New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire and The Great Pretender
"LaBrie's spellbinding prose is a metaphysical experience: cinematic, poetic, philosophical, and wholly stunning. If psychiatric disability has impacted your life, or if you've ever been lonely, or if you enjoy having exceptional writing light up your brain, this book is an essential gift. It's that rare gem that somehow holds dazzling intertextual craft and prodigiously tender honesty in equal turn, to sublime effect. This memoir will never leave me." - Alissa Nutting, author of Made for Love and Tampa
"This is a brilliant memoir about what we inherit and what we create; what disappears and what remains. Full of intelligence and rueful humor, No One Gets to Fall Apart is a triumph of every kind of literary perseverance." - Lorrie Moore, author of I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
"[An] unforgettable memoir... Deeply intelligent and unashamedly real." - Oprah Daily
"No One Gets to Fall Apart is a sensitive and courageous debut by a talented writer seeking a deeper understanding of herself and her past." - Nicole Chung, for Esquire
"Extraordinary. . . . LaBrie brings a piercing astuteness and sensitive voice to the dilemma raised by the writer's desire to tell a story." - Los Angeles Times
"Readers will be treated to a meandering and wise discussion of the past's coloring of our futures, and how to carve the best path forward even through pain and rupture." - Literary Hub
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" * --
"[A] spellbinding debut.... With unflinching honesty ('I am so terribly sick of cannibalizing my life for art') and lyrical prose, LaBrie elegantly captures the grunt work of self-acceptance." - Publishers Weekly
"A remarkable meditation on . . . the blurry line between madness and artistic brilliance." - NPR
"LaBrie's intimate and vivid chronicle is haunting in its sorrow and beautiful in its daring and hope." - Booklist
"A memoir that faces failure head-on....[LaBrie] does a remarkable job presenting the ways in which our health care system has failed the women in her family...A bracing look at a writer's troubled past." - Kirkus Reviews
"This memoir was an eye-opening account of mental illness and family dynamics. LaBrie allows readers into deeply personal moments while shedding light on more widespread themes that stem from her family's past as well as LaBrie's own creative drive." - Debutiful, "10 noteworthy debut books"
"With remarkable insight and frankness, TV writer and librettist Sarah LaBrie mines her family history of mental illness in her ambitious debut memoir... No One Gets to Fall Apart examines family dynamics, mental health, Blackness, literature, friendship, the #MeToo movement and more as LaBrie illustrates her desire to embrace her own emotions, even as the temptation to suppress them looms." - BookPage
"Introspective and vulnerable. . . . The willingness to nakedly share this healing and her struggles are exactly what make the book so alluring, and [LaBrie's] utter honesty is the strongest part of her work." - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Urgent and imaginative. . . . No One Gets to Fall Apart makes for an engrossing read, its hectic scenes held together by a psychically unmoored narrator whose wit and honesty make us trust her anyway." - New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)