We meet Sarah LaBrie in 2017, when her grandmother calls to tell her that LaBrie’s mother is experiencing delusions and paranoia. Brie is living in Los Angeles, writing commissioned opera libretti that explore generational and racial trauma on a broad scale. Since she eagerly left her childhood home in Houston, Texas, her education and career as a TV writer and librettist have carried her from coast to coast. Now, LaBrie’s focus must shift from her career in California to her mom’s well-being back in Houston. In her poignant debut memoir, No One Gets to Fall Apart, LaBrie faces her own generational trauma, and her work gets personal.
LaBrie has often been the subject of her mother’s ire, finding herself banished to a closet as a child and subjected to incessant questioning as an adult. Her family has a history of men leaving, and women and children fending for themselves. As a result, her female relatives have developed a pattern of disassociating or isolating themselves when faced with difficult situations. As LaBrie enters her 30s and life with a partner, she fears that marriage and motherhood will be opportunities to repeat her family history.
As she tries to untangle how her mother’s deteriorating mental illness—she is eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia—and her own environment, family history and socioeconomic status have shaped her, LaBrie also writes of her equally tangled unpublished novel. “I’ve become so fixated on not allowing myself to go crazy, I’ve lost touch with the feelings that the story needs to work,” she writes. Her agent suggests, instead, that LaBrie try writing about her mother. But she resists: “Her illness is unfolding according to no rules at all, and no matter how I try to hold it together, the structure falls to pieces.”
She leans into that feeling in the memoir, which ranges widely, leaping across locations and ideas, and threatens to come apart just as the author’s life seems ready to detonate. But thanks to LaBrie’s remarkable intellect and frankness, these multifaceted streams of thought coalesce. Ambitious in scope, No One Gets to Fall Apart examines family dynamics, mental health, Blackness, literature, friendship, the #MeToo movement and more as LaBrie illustrates her desire to embrace her own emotions, even as the temptation to suppress them looms.