EVERYTHING/NOTHING/SOMEONE
A Memoir

Like Girl, Interrupted and Prozac Nation, a powerful literary debut of a young woman’s coming-of-age in the bohemian 90s, as her adolescence gives way to a struggle with dissociative disorder.Alice Carriere tells the story of her unconventional upbringing in Greenwich Village as the daughter of a remote mother, the renowned painter Jennifer Bartlett, and a charismatic father, European actor Mathieu Carriere. From an early age, Alice is forced to navigate her mother’s recovered memories of Satanic sexual abuse, which she turns into art, and her father’s confusing attentions. 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.As she enters adolescence, Alice tries to make sense of the world as a dissociative disorder erases her identity and manic episodes erase her reality. She looks for meaning and self in myriad forms – as a patient in expensive psychiatric hospitals, as a wild child in the downtown NYC music scene, as a truth-seeker in a well-intentioned but destructive trauma group. Eventually she finds purpose in caring for her Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother and the aging Nanny who raised her; in a love affair with a recovering addict whose own hard-won victories steady her; and in confronting her father whose words and actions splintered her.With gallows humor and brutal honesty, Everything/Nothing/Someone explores female selfhood and all the ways the body and mind are carved up to serve the needs and wants of others. 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