EVERYTHING/NOTHING/SOMEONE

Summary

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

Compared to Girl, Interrupted, this “remarkable” (New York Times) memoir and love story, one of 2023’s most notable literary debuts, tells of a young woman’s harrowing coming-of-age journey, amid glamour, excess, and neglect, to find herself.

Alice Carrière 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 Carrière. From an early age, Alice is forced to navigate her mother’s recovered memories of ritualized sexual abuse, which she turns into art, and her father’s confusing attentions—her childhood is spent in an adult’s world, with little-to-no boundaries or supervision.

As 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, the ingenue in destructive encounters with older men—until a medication-induced psychosis brings her world 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 humor and brutal honesty, Everything/Nothing/Someone explores what it means for our body and mind to belong to us wholly and on our own terms. In precise, energetic prose, Alice manages to untangle the stories told to her by her parents, the American psychiatric complex, and her own broken mind to craft a mesmerizing narrative of emergence and, finally, cure.