On the cover of Alice Carrière's debut memoir, "Everything Nothing Someone," a quote from Dani Shapiro calls it "a master class" in the genre. I wondered if I would agree.
Like many memoirs, both those that make it to print and even more that remain in writing workshops and computer files, Carrière's is a story of inter-generational trauma, mental illness, psychiatric mismanagement and the emergence of a whole person from those trials. What makes hers extraordinary, relatable and beautiful — all of which it surely is?
One obvious "extraordinary" factor is that well-known people are involved, which, though not a requirement, never hurts. Carrière's parents were American painter Jennifer Bartlett and German actor Mathieu Carrière. If you haven't heard of them, you will definitely recognize their friends: "Anna Wintour dropped off clothes, Steve Martin joked at the table, Wynton Marsalis played trumpet in the first-floor studio, Joan Didion sipped vodka-on-the-rocks in the garden, Al Gore won votes in our living room after bomb-sniffing dogs determined it was free of explosives, Merce Cunningham shuffled gracefully through the upper studio, Susan Sarandon and Julia Roberts compared colonoscopy stories over brunch."
That passage, a list poem in itself, suggests two other virtues of the book — vivid, perfect details in abundance, and the writing. The things Carrière tries to capture — the difficulty of feeling sure she was even a person, that she didn't turn into nothing (as she has in both her parents' Wikipedia entries, which don't mention her) — is not something that is easy to describe. But Carrière does it brilliantly and thoroughly.
In the first section, she describes her mother's hug: "the occasional awkward pat, as if she were checking to see that all parts of me were still there, adjusting or confirming me, but never reaching me." In a room at a funeral home with her uncle's corpse, "I felt like a dream being dreamed by the people around me, a reverie fading as it was dragged into wakefulness." A repeated motif of water escaping its boundaries — a thin glass tumbler, a paper cone, the swimming pool underneath which her childhood bedroom was located — works on a visceral level.
The author's feeling of unreality led her to become a devoted cutter, beginning when she was 7, and the passages describing her self-harm are filled with furious lyricism. "The burning lit up every neuron, set them singing in a barbershop harmony that revealed every pitch of injury — the shivering falsetto of pain, the rich bass of analgesia ... After each cut, after each burn, I was returned to my body, I touched the walls of myself again."
With bullseye details and inspired writing, Carrière draws the reader into her story. The final section, when she becomes "someone," is filled with moments that resonate. Her reconciliations with both parents are enormously satisfying and moving, as is her marriage to a great love who only barely survives his own self-destructive tendencies. The do-or-die question of memoir — do we care? — is answered in the form of a direct pipeline to the reader's heart.
Marion Winik is a Baltimore-based writer and professor.
Everything Nothing Someone
By: Alice Carrière.
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau, 276 pages, $28.
