No One Gets to Fall Apart: A Memoir
Affecting ... In LaBrie’s hands this grim and messy story feels both urgent and imaginative. Though she sometimes writes with the flattened tone of someone trying desperately to sound OK while beating back demons, this effect is overshadowed by her sharp observations of worlds she feels excluded from ... Makes for an engrossing read, its hectic scenes held together by a psychically unmoored narrator whose wit and honesty make us trust her anyway.
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LaBrie brings a piercing astuteness and sensitive voice to the dilemma raised by the writer’s desire to tell a story. Trying to separate a family’s fictions from its realities is to enter locked closets full of redacted memories and erased stories that have been overwritten to hide the truth. Mental illness, despite our increased understanding of its causes and etiology, still causes shame. It can make a person doubt herself, make her question whether her perceptions are evidence of her own diseased mind. For a writer, the related ability to imaginatively interpret reality is turned inward.
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Introspective and vulnerable ... A searing account of what it’s like to love someone who is grappling with a severe mental illness ... The willingness to nakedly share this healing and her struggles are exactly what make the book so alluring, and her utter honesty is the strongest part of her work. Her pain is pervasive throughout, but serves a twinned purpose: the first, to plainly present the reality of her struggles, but secondly, to connect with readers who are also in her position of loving someone who is struggling with a severe mental illness.
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