NO ONE GETS TO FALL APART: A Memoir

Credit…Anna Parini , by Sarah LaBrie 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.” The author Sarah LaBrie as a baby with her mother, Kimberley Edwards, and father, Stephen LaBrie, in 1986. If she compares her mother’s disorder to drought in California — “it […]

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