New York Times Editor’s Choice * Indie Next Pick * Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction 2023 * Kirkus Best Nonfiction 2023 * Amazon Best of the Month * B&N Most Anticipated * Jennette McCurdy Book Club Pick
A “remarkable” (New York Times Book Review) memoir that tells of a young woman’s coming-of-age amid glamour, excess, and neglect, and the love affair that, against the odds, allows her to save herself.
Alice Carri?re grew up in a converted factory in Greenwich Village in the 1990s, an extravagant home based on the hyper-aestheticized vision of her artist mother, Jennifer Bartlett–with two studios, an indoor swimming pool, a rooftop garden with a koi pond, and multiple, cavernous rooms through which a steady stream of visitors flowed. Alice’s iconoclastic European father was a fleeting, atmospheric disturbance.
Alice grows up as a child living in an adult’s world, with little-to-no boundaries or supervision. As she enters adolescence, a dissociative disorder erases her identity, and overzealous doctors medicate her further into madness. In the absence of self, she inhabits various roles: as a patient in expensive psychiatric hospitals, the ingenue in destructive encounters with older men, a provocateur who weaponizes intellectual dazzle and outrageous candor–until a medication-induced psychosis brings these personas crashing down. Finally, a soulful connection with a generous and sensitive musician allows her to free herself from the pathologies that defined her and recognize her true self. With gallows humor and brutal honesty, Carri?re has written a unique and mesmerizing narrative of emergence and, at last, cure.
Author: Alice Carri?re
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Published: 07/16/2024
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.50w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9781954118553
Language: English
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