EVERYTHING/NOTHING/SOMEONE: A Memoir

by Alice Carrière Narrated by Alice Carrière

Overview

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*

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.

Editorial Reviews

OCTOBER 2023 - AudioFile

Alice Carrière opens her memoir with a matter-of-fact narration that belies the privilege she experienced growing up in a 17,000-square-foot building in New York City, where she shared rooms with fruit trees and roses that climbed a staircase and with visiting celebrities. Though her narration grows emotional periodically, it is, for the most part, straightforward. Her style is welcome in an audio that is both candid and extreme as she describes her bohemian mother's eccentricities, exotic travels with her father, an actor; cutting herself; and institutionalization for mental illness. This may be the most honest memoir ever written. Descriptions of sexual abuse and cutting scenes may make listeners uncomfortable, but they are well rendered and haunting. S.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175901826
Publisher:	Spiegel & Grau by Spotify Audiobooks
Publication date:	08/29/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

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