September 13th: Alice Carrière in conversation with Wallace Shawn

Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Alice Carrière will discuss her new book Everything/Nothing/Someone with Wallace Shawn.

This event will be streamed virtually on Wednesday, September 13th at 6 PM ET.

Alice Carrière — Everything/Nothing/Someone (Published by Spiegel & Grau, 2023)

Alice Carrière tells the story of her unconventional upbringing in Greenwich Village as the daughter of a remote mother, the renowned artist Jennifer Bartlett, and a charismatic father, European actor Mathieu Carrière. From an early age, Alice is forced to navigate her mother’s recovered memories of ritualized sexual abuse, which she turns into art, and her father’s confusing attentions. Her days are a mixture of privilege, neglect, loneliness, and danger—a child living in an adult’s world, with little-to-no enforcement of boundaries or supervision.

When she enters adolescence, Alice begins to lose her grasp on herself, as a dissociative disorder erases her identity and overzealous doctors medicate her further away from herself. She inhabits various roles: as a patient in expensive psychiatric hospitals, a denizen of the downtown New York music scene, the ingenue in destructive encounters with older men—ricocheting from experience to experience until a medication-induced psychosis brings these personas crashing down. Eventually, she finds purpose in caring for her Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother, in a love affair with a recovering addict who steadies her, in confronting her father whose words and actions splintered her, and in finding her voice as a writer.

With gallows humor and brutal honesty, Everything/Nothing/Someone explores what it means for our body and mind to belong to us wholly, irrevocably, and on our own terms. In pulsing, energetic prose that is both precise and probing, Alice manages to untangle the stories told to her by her parents, the American psychiatric complex, and her own broken mind to craft a unique and mesmerizing narrative of emergence and, finally, cure.

Photo: Sebastian Piras

Alice Carrière is a graduate of Columbia University. This is her first book. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, and Amagansett, New York.

Wallace Shawn is an American actor, playwright, and essayist. His film roles include Wally Shawn in My Dinner with Andre, Vizzini in The Princess Bride, Mr. James Hall in Clueless, and the voice of Rex in the Toy Story franchise. His plays include Marie and Brice, Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Fever, The Designated Mourner, Grasses of a Thousand Colors, and Evening at the Talk House.