Everything/Nothing/Someone

This exceptional memoir and love story tells of a young woman's harrowing coming-of-age amid glamour, excess, and neglect, and her journey, against the odds, to find herself.

Alice Carrière 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 Carrière. 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. Alice begins to lose her grasp on reality 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 ingenue in destructive encounters with older men-ricocheting from experience to experience until a medication-induced psychosis brings these personas crashing down. 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.