In March 2017, Sarah LaBrie, a TV writer living in Los Angeles, received a phone call from her grandmother, who unspooled an alarming thread of calamities suggesting that LaBrie’s mother was suffering from severe mental illness. She had been found parked on the side of the freeway in Houston, the author’s hometown, “honking her horn, her car filled with notes in which she outlined federal agents’ plans to kill her.” These fears had been dogging her for a month, during which she sometimes “slept in her car, not going inside to shower or change,” the number of her imagined pursuers ballooning to the hundreds. After submerging her work computer in the bathtub, LaBrie’s mother had been fired from her job as a registered nurse.
By the time of the phone call, her mother had returned home from the psychiatric hospital outside Houston where she’d been drugged to sleep for 48 hours. She didn’t remember any of it, LaBrie’s grandmother explained; her mother was “back to normal,” looking for a new nursing job and blaming the diagnosis she received — severe depression — on “Houston traffic and the onset of menopause.”
In her affecting debut memoir, LaBrie chronicles her mother’s descent into what would eventually be diagnosed as schizophrenia, while also exploring the through-line of mental illness that snakes through her family history. Her great-grandmother Alma, whose own grandmother was enslaved, “spent most of her time in bed and was likely depressed before anyone used the word” — especially to describe a Black woman. LaBrie’s violent and erratic grandfather, may have been an undiagnosed schizophrenic. And, in an inner monologue that reveals snippets of bizarre behavior, LaBrie also worries about her own tenuous grasp on emotional stability, imagining mental illness “spreading its way through my mother and turning her into someone I don’t recognize, and then … making its way through her into me.”
If she compares her mother’s disorder to drought in California — “it could come and go and come and go and come back worse every time” — the sudden fits of rage she remembers from her childhood are like Houston thunderstorms, which “emerge fully formed out of what moments before appeared to be a cloudless sky.”
As her mother combs her hair one evening in their home — on the same upscale street in Houston’s Third Ward where Beyoncé and Solange Knowles are also being raised — a childish joke sends her mother into a spiral of violence: She hits LaBrie and locks her in a closet, where the girl sits in a blanket of darkness, rolling two turquoise marbles between her fingers. An argument about dog food results in their three dogs’ abandonment outside a strip mall; “I watch the dogs through the side mirrors chasing the car, trying to catch up, pink tongues lolling,” LaBrie writes. “Back home, she tells me to take off my pants, bends me over the bathtub and beats me with a belt until I finally start to cry.”
LaBrie escapes Texas to go to Brown, where she spends years desperately code-switching her way through predominantly white spaces that include a boozy college party where she is sexually assaulted, a creative writing fellowship at N.Y.U. and an internship at The New Yorker. She struggles to write a novel about time travel called “The Anatomy Book,” which she describes as a tumor. “But if I try to cut it out,” she tells a friend, “I’ll die.”
Her mother’s illness intrudes on her life throughout; her text messages “fill up my phone like dark poems.” Her mother hears the voice of the former Houston Rockets center Hakeem Olajuwon telling her she doesn’t have to open the door to her social worker or take her meds. Despite the ever-mounting pile of evidence to the contrary, LaBrie and her loved ones continue to support one another’s denial that her mother is sick. “Black people don’t go to therapy,” her grandmother insists, buying her daughter “some books on personal improvement” instead. LaBrie’s boyfriend, Ethan, blames her family’s issues on “bad luck,” and suggests she stop trying to “predict the future” (and his words become the title of this book). Her Aunt Tina tells her mental illness “didn’t happen to people you knew.”
In LaBrie’s hands this grim and messy story feels both urgent and imaginative. Though she sometimes writes with the flattened tone of someone trying desperately to sound OK while beating back demons, this effect is overshadowed by her sharp observations of worlds she feels excluded from. In college she and a Black friend find a “common enemy in the other girls studying literature, with their shiny hair, and eating disorders that make them look frail and breakable, like little, brittle Joan Didions in training.” In adulthood she thinks that “following the literary world feels more and more like watching the fragile children of aristocrats gingerly explore their talents while their friends applaud and the world around them burns.”
“No One Gets to Fall Apart” makes for an engrossing read, its hectic scenes held together by a psychically unmoored narrator whose wit and honesty make us trust her anyway.
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