Okay, this book is bananas. And cue all the trigger warnings if you’re planning on reading Alice Carrière’s memoir, Everything, Nothing, Someone.

In brief, Carrière recalls her unconventional and bohemian upbringing in Greenwich Village in the nineties. Her mother, renowned artist, Jennifer Bartlett, and her charismatic father, European actor Mathieu Carrière, each loom large in the memoir for very different reasons.

From an early age, Carrière is forced to navigate her mother’s recovered memories of ritualized sexual abuse (which form the basis for her art), and her father’s ‘confusing’ attentions. There are no boundaries, no supervision, no sense of care and Carrière passes her days in a combination of extreme privilege, neglect, and loneliness. Her adolescence and young adulthood are characterised by self-harm, and she is eventually diagnosed with a dissociative disorder. What follows is years of medication; expensive psychiatric hospitals; risky behaviour and poor relationships. However, Carrière finds a way to address her relationship with each of her parents, and redirect the course her life.

There are so many aspects of this book that deserve review, however, I’m going to confine it to Carrière’s profound attachment trauma.

It begins on page one, when she describes having to ‘call’ her mother on an intercom in their house, in order to speak to her. However, her mother kept her intercom on privacy mode, so ‘…she could reach me, but I couldn’t reach her.‘ The most basic building block of human development is having our needs communicated and responded to. That’s why babies cry (and a bit later they learn to smile). Carrière’s safety and emotional needs as a child were not met by her parents – instead, she relies on her nanny, Denys.

To me, she was a mother, but one who could be fired and disappear at any moment.

During her early childhood, every aspect of Carrière’s life was controlled by her mother, and her mother’s only interest was her work (the house was simply another canvas). Each year, her mother redecorated her bedroom as a birthday ‘surprise’ –

It set me trembling with excitement but also panic, the trepidation of meeting the girl this unfamiliar room belonged to.

Excitement and panic…  dichotomy is the central theme. The same applies to her relationship with her father, who treats her as an adult rather than a child. She describes their home as ‘…a place of abundance and of absence…‘, and her education as lacking –

I wasn’t taught anything about real life. I knew the locations of Fra Angelico frescoes, I could recite all the lyrics to Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera in German… At fifteen, I still didn’t know how to use a tampon because no one thought to tell me and I hadn’t thought to ask. There were no lessons or tips or admonishments.

As Carrière’s mental health deteriorates (and the medications and diagnoses pile up), she observes –

I started to think of myself as a machine that ran on pharmaceuticals, an appliance designed to obliterate feelings. I had learned from my mother that feelings were not welcome, and now I was learning they were pathological. There was no such thing as sadness, only clinical depression. Joy and motivation were only harbingers of hypomania. Feelings, good or bad, meant that something was wrong.

There’s a devastating moment toward the end of the book when Carrière writes to her mother explaining how she experienced their relationship. Her mother reads the letter immediately and then tells Carrière that it was ‘very nice’ –

“Well it’s true,” I said, instinctively raising my arms for an embrace.
“Why don’t you keep it for me?” she said. My arms found their place at my side again. She handed the letter back to me and went back into her room.

Their relationship plays out in dozens of moments like this. The old saying, ‘death by a thousand cuts’ unfortunately came to mind when reading this book – the small and continual cruelties, the inconsistencies, the narcissism – when these things happen from the beginning of a person’s life, they become the template, and we know no different.

My mother got up, walked over to me, and placed her arms limply around my shoulders. She stood there for a few seconds and returned to her chair. The hug had not given me what she’d intended, it had given me something else. It had given me its shortcoming, which was far more useful to me.

I’m loathe to say how Carrière’s story unfolds for fear of spoilers but I am amazed by her generosity and willingness to address her relationship with her parents. I wonder how that sense of care and empathy was nurtured, given its complete absence from her own life (short of what Denys was permitted to offer).  Carrière’s persistence is remarkable.

If you were riveted by Adrienne Brodeur’s memoir, Wild Game, then you’ll inhale this.

3.5/5

As the doctor performed the cesarean, my father played a word game with my mother. “Name a French writer who has the same name as a piece of meat,” he said.
“Colette,” said my mother.
“Not bad, but that’s côtelette,” he said.
“Chateaubriand,” the surgeon said and pulled me out, as if I were the answer to every riddle.

As part of the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge, I’m comparing the Oxford summer and Melburnian winter. The results for the day I finished this book (June 6): Oxford 9°-19° and Melbourne 9°-15°.