No One Gets to Fall Apart
Not mothers or their daughters, in our January Book Club Pick
Our January 2025 Book Club pick, as announced on Memoiring’s IG feed earlier this month because, well, life, is No One Gets to Fall Apart by TV writer, producer, and author Sarah LaBrie. It’s a gorgeously written, much lauded debut—a New York Times Editors’ Pick and Notable Book of 2024, and many more.
Before I tell you what it’s about, can we just pause for a moment to appreciate this book’s incredibly compelling title?!
January Author Event: Sarah LaBrie joins us in conversation over Zoom on Wed., January 29 @ 6:30pm ET. Sign up now! It’s free for subscribers to this newsletter, which is also free.
Part of the reason I can’t wait to chat with Sarah LaBrie is because she and I write about moms with schizophrenia. Her mother was a nurse with psychosis, mine was a child psychologist who started to hear voices. What this illness does to the mother-daughter relationship is a topic I ALWAYS want to read about (and write about).
In LaBrie’s memoir, mothers and daughters learn to hide and fake normalcy in the world—and with each other. Sarah is 17, living with her mother who’s been undiagnosed but ill for a long time, when a school administrator finally asks, “Is your mom okay?” She’s the first person to ever ask Sarah this question. Help or treatment isn’t discussed. The admin, like everyone else, defaults to silence. Even though Sarah welcomes the question, we can see how no one gets to fall apart. Everyone’s expected to survive this way.
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Over the course of the memoir, LaBrie digs into the events that led to her mother’s mental illness and breakdown. She goes back three generations to examine a legacy of trauma imprinted on black women. And on a path forward to look more closely her own emotional life: a fixation with a novel she’s been trying to write for decades, a depression that came with being a scholarship student at Brown, and complicated feelings about her white partner.
It’s a powerfully slim 200 pages, deftly structured around images of LaBrie’s life, “so that sense [as in meaning] emerges from their arrangement rather than directly from the texts themselves.” The structure borrows from literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, with whom LaBrie’s had a long intellectual “infatuation.” The flow of the narrative using his modified approach feels seamless, even “familiar" to quote LaBrie, as a way to slip into recollections of the past.
Over the December holidays Sarah shot this video with her adorable co-star Birdie LaBrie (aka Larry Bird) reading from the memoir’s first few pages. Give it a watch!
📖 Read No One Gets to Fall Apart (Oct. 2024, HarperCollins) — and sign up now to chat with Sarah LaBrie and the Memoiring community over Zoom.
Want to know what happens on these Zooms and what we’re all about? FAQs are right here. Thanks for being here! Memoiringly, Melisse