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Loading... Everything/Nothing/Someone: A Memoirby Alice Carriere
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. "Too Much Anger, Too Many Tears" meets "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" in this memoir of growing up with serious mental illness, much of it induced by reactions to medications prescribed for what started out as a mild emotional sort of depression. Alice might not have been sicker than most teenagers if se hadn't so willingly swallowed all those pills. As things are, while on drugs (mostly but not all legal medication), she exaggerates her father's relatively minor mistakes to the point where he has to leave the coimtru kist because she'd rather live with her mother, tries street drugs, sleeps around, and eventually decides to be a responsible adult--seeking her father's forgiveness, nursing her mother through the mother's final illness. With all the damage drugs have done her, Alice doesn't achieve healthiness or responsibility overnight, but her life-affirming story is already being recognized as important enough for schools to put on student reading lists. Parents might object to their children's reading this book in high schol. It's raw, often disgusting, disturbing, scary. We meet intestinal parasites and watch surgical wounds failing to heal. I''d recommend this book for ages 18+ but would not try to use it in high school. I'd let its not being recommended to them motivate high school students to discover it on their own. Growing up with divorced parents is hard enough, but memoirist Alice Carriere had it tougher than many. Ignored by her aloof artist mother and treated inappropriately by her lecherous actor father, young Alice sought shelter in audiobooks and the love of her governess, Nanny. These supports, however, did not prevent her from developing a raging case of dissociative disorder. While her peers were attending college, Alice spent time in elite psychiatric hospitals and dealing with doctors who prescribed multiple drugs and told her that she could never live without them. Her therapist encouraged Alice to see herself as a victim of molestation. Despite everything she goes through, Alice nonetheless grows up to discover forgiveness, healing and love. This memoir is impressively written; Alice certainly knows her way around a metaphor. She is not afraid to present herself as she really is, even at the height of a manic, paranoid, or dissociative episode, or her parents as they really are. Highly recommended. I received an electronic pre-publication copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I was not compensated in any way. no reviews | add a review
Alice Carričre 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 Carričre. 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 days are a mixture of privilege, neglect, loneliness, and danger--a child living in an adult's world, with little-to-no enforcement of boundaries or supervision. When she enters adolescence, Alice begins to lose her grasp on herself, 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, a denizen of the downtown New York music scene, the ingénue in destructive encounters with older men--ricocheting from experience to experience until a medication-induced psychosis brings these personas 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, irrevocably, and on our own terms. In pulsing, energetic prose that is both precise and probing, Alice manages to untangle the stories told to her by her parents, the American psychiatric complex, and her own broken mind to craft a unique and mesmerizing narrative of emergence and, finally, cure. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)616.85Technology Medicine and health Diseases Diseases of nervous system and mental disorders MiscellaneousLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Also, contrary to the comments of many, I don’t think the writing is anything special at all. The author is perhaps less interesting than she thinks she is. There’s something flat about the whole endeavour. I question the book’s being published. To what end? Sensationalism? By turns dreary and debauched, this memoir could not and in fact did not end soon enough for me. I simply stopped at the one-third point. Two hundred more pages seemed like unnecessary torture. Cannot recommend. ( )