Episode 90 - Sarah LaBrie, No One Gets To Fall Apart: A memoir

Sarah LaBrie was in her early thirties when her mother was found on a highway outside Houston, screaming at passing cars and paranoid that she would be murdered by invisible assailants. She was ultimately diagnosed with schizophrenia—and in an instant, the entirety of LaBrie’s childhood came into sharp focus. In her harrowing, clear-sighted, and painfully honest debut memoir, NO ONE GETS TO FALL APART (Publication Date: October 22, 2024; $27.99), LaBrie traces a year spent grappling with the enormity of her mother’s diagnosis. With compassion and vulnerability, she reflects on the consequences of being raised by someone with mental illness, processes her own obsessive behavior and unhealthy ambition, and examines her fear of inheriting the disorder or passing it along to her own future children.

 

In childhood, LaBrie’s relationship with her mother is marked at turns by violence and all-consuming closeness. She’s erratic, easily angered and cruel, but also loving and protective, committed to LaBrie’s education and artistry and to making huge sacrifices as a single mom so her daughter could lead a stable life. Digging into the events that led to her psychotic break, LaBrie traces the line 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 New York to Los Angeles, and touching on work by James Baldwin, Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, NO ONE GETS TO FALL APART is an unflinching chronicle of one woman’s attempt to forge a new future by making sense of history.  

 

A writer from Houston, Sarah LaBrie’s libretti have been performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall, and her fiction appears in Guernica, The Literary Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She now lives in Los Angeles where she has written for television shows including Minx, Blindspotting, Made for Love, and Love, Victor. “In 2017, I learned from my grandmother that my mother had been experiencing schizophrenic delusions for months,” she explains. “We were estranged and no one told me, because no one thought it was a big deal. That same year, my best friend shared private information with the world that I wasn’t ready to reveal, then ‘broke up with me’ when I found myself unable to talk about it with her. I was working a job I hated while my friends all seemed to be coming into their own, and my partner, the son of prominent psychology professors from Boston, had grown up with a life so different from mine I didn’t think he would ever understand. I started writing the book out of loneliness. I wanted to reconstruct all these broken parts into layers as opposed to puzzle pieces. I wanted to convey that there are many different ways to understand the past and how it makes us who we are.”

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