No One Gets to Fall Apart: A Memoir

Summary

Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award

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"" *

“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

In this poignant memoir, as candid and indelible as The Glass Castle and Memorial Drive, a writer takes on the conflict between the love that binds us to home and the desire to escape it for good.

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.

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