The average social media feed is inundated with therapy speak, leading one to assume that, finally, society is comfortable talking about mental illness. Though we’ve made strides in destigmatizing mental illness, society’s deployment of therapy speak does not begin to address the acute trauma that mental illness has on both the person experiencing it and the loved ones supporting them.
Sarah LaBrie gracefully straddled multiple worlds, physically and emotionally pogo-sticking from school days at an elite private school to being locked in a closet because her mother was experiencing a psychotic episode. LaBrie grew up to become a producer, librettist, TV writer, and now author of No One Gets To Fall Apart (Harper, 2024), her breathtaking memoir that shows a daughter’s life lived alongside her mother’s schizophrenia. The reader grows up along with LaBrie as she navigates an ambitious and intentional life while her mother contends with schizophrenia. We see the limits of distance and distraction and the undeniable ways that the mother–daughter relationship—often loving and fraught all at once—is the lens through which many see the beauty and heartbreak they are capable of.
In addition to thoughtful consideration of mental illness sans therapy speak, my conversation with LaBrie reflects on the presence of race, class, craft, and genre in both the writer’s life and her memoir.
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The Rumpus: Did you feel like you had to write this book? And if so, what was the urgency behind it?
Sarah LaBrie: I think so. The book is about my mom’s schizophrenic break in 2017, and that’s when I started writing it. And at the time, I was writing a novel called The Anatomy Book about time travel. It was a romance, science fiction, very literary book—like I got into Yaddo in the first chapter—and I really felt like I was on my way. I was going to be one of those novelists who I had admired so much growing up and who I studied with at NYU. I felt very intentional about that being my life, and I’d gotten very lost in the novel because I knew some of it was good, but I just got kind of stuck. It’s that weird thing where you’re like, “Okay, writing is hard. It’s supposed to be hard. You have to wake up every day and do it. But at what point do you realize that it’s burying you?”
The book starts with me getting this phone call about my mom, and suddenly, I just couldn’t care about those ambitions anymore. That whole world is like residencies and awards and speeches, and that had been everything for me. And then suddenly there was a massive grief in my life. My mom was found by the police on the side of the highway screaming. And not only that, but she refused to accept that she had schizophrenia or was having delusions, which is a symptom of schizophrenia, and wouldn’t take medication, wouldn’t seek treatment, and I had never encountered anything like that in my life. Because I was already in the habit of writing every day—and I was very disciplined about that, and I really organized my life around being a writer—this other story kind of crept in, and I found myself writing about that.
The Rumpus: Were you apprehensive about leaning into the nonfiction of it all?
LaBrie: Well, no, I think I was lucky. I didn’t know that the memoir was going to sell. I didn’t know it was going to be anything. I wasn’t thinking about readers or the marketplace or anything like that at all. I really needed a book like this, a story about mental illness and Blackness and friendship and relationships that didn’t necessarily fit the dominant narratives or what you think of when you think of books like that. I was writing in the style of books that I love, and I was reading books like How to Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell. It’s dark and sarcastic and funny, but it’s also about these parts of ourselves that we try to hide. I just felt like I would love to write this book for someone like me who needs it.
Rumpus: One thing that I wasn’t expecting was how you wove the writer at work into your book. Building that experience into the story felt so organic to me as a reader. How did that come about?
LaBrie: You probably can relate to this as a writer and someone who went to grad school, but writing was my religion. It was kind of an aesthetic. I renounced my social life. I kept my expenses as low as possible. All I did was wake up and write. And so that was my entire life. I would freelance and I had side hustles just to pay my rent, which was $700 a month because of my apartment. I lived with my partner, sharing this little one-bedroom apartment that we’d happen to get rent-controlled right after the economic collapse in 2011. So, I really built my entire life around this one thing.
Rumpus: We tend to read stories about mental illness from the point of view of observing a family member with it or describing our own, but you do this really interesting third thing where you write about being the child of a mentally ill person who is worried about becoming mentally ill yourself. Was there any apprehension in positioning yourself relative to your mother’s mental illness at all?
LaBrie: I have always felt so deeply enmeshed with my mother that, even though we hadn’t been speaking for years when this book starts, I felt like whatever happened to her would happen to me because she raised me alone. She was so erratic but sometimes so deeply involved in my life. So, she was always in me in some way. I felt like I was about to drive straight into a brick wall with a novel. I felt so on the edge. And then when I got that call that she actually had a psychotic break, I felt like, “Oh, is this a premonition of what’s going to happen to me?” I was writing it as I was trying to figure out what was going on, and I’d already established a discipline of just writing all the time, so that was how I was processing it. Some of those pages are in the book, written in real-time.
Rumpus: That’s fascinating because there are so many discussions on how long you should take between an event and when you’re writing about it. There are heated arguments about how it’s five years, no, ten. Sometimes, there’s a really compelling argument for an immediate processing.
LaBrie: It was very important to me to approach this from a solid craft perspective. And I definitely didn’t leave anything in the manuscript that I didn’t feel was solidly written on a sentence level. But some of that, some of the writing that I did at the time, was worth staying in. It had the emotion that was driving it, and it matched my ability to write about it.
Rumpus: Reading the book and observing your relationship with your aunt and grandmother, it felt like they gave you that permission to think and talk and speak about this as broadly as you needed to.
LaBrie: I just think everybody has to process that kind of thing in their own way. It’s scary to talk about, it’s scary to see, it’s scary to think you’re going have to deal with. I’ve always felt so loved and supported by my family. And there were definitely periods where—I don’t think I put this in the book—my senior year, my grandmother asked if I wanted to come live with her because things with my mom had just gotten so out of hand. So, she would pick me up from school, she would take me to do nice little things, take me to Whole Foods and let me get whatever I wanted, just so that I knew that I was loved. Instead of anybody being able to articulate it, that freedom for me to comprehend it however I needed to, while also feeling supported and loved, was their way.
Rumpus: That’s really beautiful. It’s like the Black “show, don’t tell.” Maybe we can’t say it, but we can show it. I love that.
There’s a way that you’re able to talk about race in this book that is both effortless and head-on. Is that something that just comes naturally to you or that you thought about?
LaBrie: I feel like race means so many different things to so many different people, and we’ve kind of allowed it to be consolidated into this single story in a way that I think people are afraid to talk about because they don’t want people to get mad at them on the internet. But my hope is that we can move past that. If I can be as specific as possible about my own understanding of my experience, that will have to resonate with some other people. I’m not the only person who feels this way about so many things. I’m also in a writing group with a bunch of Black writers and artists, and I’ve had friends read this, and my editors and everybody has kind of had a similar response: “Oh yeah, I feel that way, I get it.” This has grounded me in a feeling that a lot of what I’m saying about race is grounded in a feeling that a lot of people have. And if I’m wrong, I’m wrong, fine. Talk to me about it. I’m just interested in connection and finding ways to connect with other people and communicate on a level that makes other people feel less alone.
I mainlined every single essay James Baldwin ever wrote before I wrote this book. And he wrote very specifically about mainstream perceptions and conversations around race, even though he was writing decades ago. So, there is a precedent for this. My writing is rooted in a tradition of Black writing.
Rumpus: We’re both native Houstonians, so I was naturally absorbed in your beautiful and realistic depiction of Houston, but all of the places in this memoir felt like characters in your story. How did you capture place in such a seamless way?
LaBrie: It was a deliberate choice. I was thinking a lot about Rachel Kushner, who writes a lot about writing about place, and I really just had that in my mind. How do I make it clear that this place is sort of fundamental to who this narrative voice is? That was just very important to me. It was something I wrote a lot and then pulled back a lot. I wanted it to feel effortless, but it definitely wasn’t.
Rumpus: It seems like you were able to put some distance between yourself and the narrator in this memoir. But does that resonate at all? And if so, did it allow you to make certain decisions as a writer?
LaBrie: Yeah, for sure. I tend to be extremely hard on myself and extremely critical as I’m drafting. And I was reading a ton of memoirs, I was finding that it was very important to me not to write a memoir that felt at all self-indulgent. I did not want anybody to be like, “This sentence isn’t great, but I pity her.” It was really important for me to have a narrative distance so that the reader could read it as a reader and not as somebody who was thinking about me as a person. To that end, I sought out books that I felt did that effectively, like Jade Sharma’s Problems, though I’m not sure if that’s fiction or autofiction. I was trying to read books that had that kind of self-critical distance so that it would be inherent in the language.
Rumpus: And not like, “Let me tell you about all the bad things that happen to me. Let me tell you about all the things that will absolutely result in you pitying me.”
LaBrie: I’m not a victim. I mean, bad things have happened to me, but I’ve also done bad things. This is not meant to be a trauma dump. This is supposed to be a book with a narrative structure and an arc that leads to catharsis, like all of the stuff that you want from both a good novel and a good work of nonfiction.
Rumpus: I do think a lot of women tend to write about the romantic relationship as the critical relationship of a book. It was refreshing to see all kinds of relationships explored, especially the creation and implosion of a friendship, your role in it, the power dynamics, and how those power dynamics shifted over time. Tell me more about the role of friendship in your memoir.
LaBrie: It was this strange emotional wound where there was this person I thought of as one of my closest friends, who I really admired, and I didn’t really understand why our friendship suddenly seemed to be crumbling. That was something that I was going through while I was also trying to figure out what was happening with my mother and how to handle that. And so, it felt like when I started writing there was so much pressure and so much chaos. And the chaos in the writing was just like a release spell to get it all out and figure out what I was trying to do. That was in 2017, before there was any sort of coherent manuscript. As I started revising and rewriting and working on some of the Walter Benjamin research, his friendship with Gershom Scholem really felt like it mirrored what was happening with me. And I was like, “Oh, that’s kind of an interesting pattern.” When I found those commonalities, I started pulling them out and finding some connections there that felt important to the structure of the book but also made me feel like this happens to everyone. This is happening to Walter Benjamin, obviously on a much deeper and more drastic and darker scale. I’m not comparing myself to Benjamin by any means, but it’s an interesting pattern. I wanted to see what’s there.
Rumpus: Reading this book was its own exercise in creating a totally new reading list, and talking to you now makes me want to update it!
LaBrie: I want to talk to people who want to read these books, have read them, or are reading them. That’s the whole point of writing: forging connections.
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Author photograph courtesy of Sarah LaBrie