“No One Gets to Fall Apart” Is an Unflinching Look at Mental Illness, Trauma, and Belonging https://ift.tt/MPKFzGX
In her debut memoir, No One Gets to Fall Apart, Sarah LaBrie traces the path of her mother’s mental illness while she grapples with her own path as a writer, which entails attempting to figure out how much is already predetermined for her by her family’s patterns, and her own. In a society that often struggles to look at serious mental illness head on, LaBrie unflinchingly illuminates the effects that such an illness can have on family members and also considers how the trauma of family members — both those passed on and still alive — can influence the course of mental illness.
The memoir’s narrative begins in March 2017 when LaBrie receives a call at her apartment in Los Angeles from her grandmother based in Houston, where her mother also resides. Her grandmother informs her of her mother’s recent erratic behavior that has culminated in her being committed to a psychiatric ward. “I hang up awash in guilt,” LaBrie writes, “open the calendar on my phone, and try to remember what I was doing for the nights she was in the hospital and I didn’t know.” As it turns out, writes LaBrie, “I was home writing and feeling bad about not going to the symphony while my mother was in a car on the side of a highway begging someone to save her life.”
From there, the story moves in step with LaBrie as she contends with her mother’s increasingly unignorable illness amidst her efforts to forge a career, following her between L.A., where she is building her life with her partner, Ethan, and their dog, and visits to Houston. Other locations are interspersed, including, briefly, Brown University, where she attends college, and New York City for her MFA and an internship, both locations where LaBrie contemplates her true belonging. There is the sense that LaBrie is figuring out her own feelings through her writing, which makes visceral her urgency, uncertainty, and pain but also leads to a sometimes messy, circular narrative. LaBrie may have physically moved on from her place of origin, but it is clear she still feels the pull of her past, and its push into her present, two seemingly parallel lines that somehow constantly continue to intersect.
Her past is in some ways akin to the novel she is struggling to write throughout the memoir, The Anatomy Book, which at one point LaBrie compares to “a tumor, a parasite.” “[B]ut if I try to cut it out, I’ll die,” she tells a friend. Fittingly, along her journey of writing this book, it becomes clear to LaBrie that the blocker in her progress is a character that, unbeknownst to her, has sprung from a past trauma she thought she had successfully pushed out of her mind. Instead, this character has become an integral part of her novel’s structure, impossible to excise or to tolerate. In the memoir, the idea that there is always more lurking beneath the surface, regardless of whether or not one is consciously aware, proliferates.
This, LaBrie comes to realize, is also the case for her past, and the broader past of her family. The manifestations of the family’s past trauma, stemming from enslavement and incidences of violence and racism, may appear differently in different members of her family, but they are there regardless. Her mother’s mental illness, for example, could be read as the result of “pain layered over itself,” LaBrie writes. And while her grandmother has achieved an outward appearance of success and calmly maintains her denial of the extent of her daughter’s illness, it is clear that she, too, carries the “family legacy of violent emotion,” except that she “learned to be very good at hiding what she inherited.”
LaBrie is gripped with fear over retracing the path her mother has trodden, but hiding, she comes to realize, has a price as well. Up until this point, LaBrie has acted out of an avoidance borne of her past, but by the memoir’s end, she is starting to envision herself as “a branch spiraling off from my mother to start a new world,” a hopeful note in this familial cycle.
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