No One Gets to Fall Apart: A Memoir

A New York Times Notable Book
A Best Book of the Year — NPR, Esquire, Elle
Finalist for the Writers’ League of Texas Book Award
Longlisted for Reading the West

On a highway in Houston, Texas, Sarah LaBrie’s mother was found screaming at passing cars, terrified she would be murdered by invisible assailants. The diagnosis of schizophrenia that followed compelled Sarah to rethink her childhood, marked at turns by violence and all-consuming closeness in their complex mother-daughter relationship.

Digging into the events that led to her mother’s break, Sarah traces her family history of generational trauma and mental illness, from the dysphoria that plagued her great-grandmother, a granddaughter of slaves, to her own experience with depression as a scholarship student at Brown. At the same time, she navigates a decades-long fixation on a novel she can’t finish but can't abandon, her complicated feelings about her white partner, and a fraught friendship colored by betrayal.

Spanning the globe from Houston’s Third Ward to Paris to Tallinn and New York to Los Angeles, No One Gets to Fall Apart is an unflinching chronicle of one Black woman's attempt to forge a new future through a better understanding of the past.