Everything/Nothing/Someone

New York Times Editors 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 PickA remarkable (New York Times Book Review) memoir that tells of a young womans coming-of-age amid glamour, excess, and neglect, and the love affair that, against the odds, allows her to save herself.Alice Carrire 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 Bartlettwith 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. Alices iconoclastic European father was a fleeting, atmospheric disturbance.Alice grows up as a child living in an adults 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 candoruntila 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, Carrire has written a unique and mesmerizing narrative of emergence and, at last, cure.