Home › Books › Everything/Nothing/Someone
Everything/Nothing/Someone
by
92/99
Critics' Rating Index
42/99
Readers' Rating Index
n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
66/99
Volume of Reviews
84/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
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.
Reviews
"The book's final third is its strongest, in large part because Carrière mostly abandons her attempts at lilting and loftiness, sheds the fussy, metaphor-dazed diction and simply tells us what happened."
"The strength of her writing is only occasionally interrupted by repetition, and by a few graphic passages that might have benefited from a lighter touch ..."
"Render[s] real and poignant her experience—both material and interior—in stunning prose."
"It's also about how people make art and build family, how philosophy—her father was a protégé of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze—intersects with lived experience, and how people try and fail to connect ..."
"With bullseye details and inspired writing, Carrière draws the reader into her story."
"Brutal, illuminating."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!