ALICE CARRIÉRE WAS NERVOUS about our podcast interview. She was inexperienced in being interviewed and worried that she would not do well. Listen in and read along as you hear and see a writer who had no reason to worry. Carriére reveals herself to be not only skilled in storytelling, but in understanding what story can do. She is generous in her instruction on how to write memoir, and she has since been widely interviewed, wonderfully-reviewed and is now writing book reviews on the works of others. In all, she has quickly established herself as a real talent in the writing world. We took on how to write memoir about a troubled family. Read on.
Marion: Welcome to QWERTY, the podcast for writers on how to live the writing life. I’m Marion Roach Smith. Each episode, I talk to writers from all genres to discover what makes a good read, and along the way we discuss their writing process, discover their tips, and talk about what matters most to writers. So, step away from the computer or typewriter for a bit and join us. Today my guest is Alice Carrière. Her literary debut is her memoir, Everything/Nothing/Someone, just out from Spiegel & Grau. Publishers Weekly referred to her writing as, quote, “surgically precise prose.” And I agree. She takes on complicated family history, trauma, the power of the story, mental health, the industry of mental health, and nothing less than her own reclamation of self in this book. Welcome, Alice.
Alice: Thank you so much. I’m so thrilled to be here. I’m such a fan of your insightful questions and your fabulous laugh.
Marion: (Laughter) See?
Alice: Yes, I did it. I got to experience it in person. Yes. It’s as thrilling as I remember. So gratifying.
Marion: That’s fabulous. Thank you. I love that. Well, we’re going to get along just great. So, let’s just start at the top. Let’s talk about the power of title. In this book title, you invite us in as well as any title I’ve ever read. It is the utterly the promise of a story of transcendent change. And I teach a whole class on how to choose a book title. And going forward, I’m going to use this title in that class because you expertly convey your journey. So, we’re going to talk about that journey in a moment, but tell me, please, when in the process of the writing this book or writing, editing, publishing, when did you establish this title, and what did it do for you once you had it?
Alice: Well, I am so grateful that it resonated, and what an honor that you’ll be using it as an example. Wow. It was really late in the game, to be honest. In one form or another, I’ve been working on this… Well, I’ve never not been writing this book. It had already been purchased by a publisher. I was on one of the final drafts, and it just hit me. And I think it was also inspired by, my mother has a fictionalized autobiography called History of the Universe, which makes her the universe, which if you knew my mother, that would be very appropriate. She was sort of known for her muchness and her grandiosity. So I was inspired by her, I guess, arrogance, for lack of a better word, but then inspired to move away from it because she lived such an isolated life in a lot of ways. So I wanted not only a title that would help structure my journey, but also really live the journey. It’s turning outwards. It’s about human connection, and it’s going in that direction of human connection.
Marion: Well, that’s great, and it’s helpful because you have what we call in the trade “the burden of great material.” And you open the book big. 17,000-square foot home in Manhattan, lavish parties. There’s a huge staff. There’s a cook, a housekeeper, a studio manager, a koi pond person. You talk about your mother, who’s Jennifer Bartlett, one of the most widely exhibited artists of her generation. Your father is a highly charismatic European actor. You are someone who at home run into Anna Wintour, who’s dropping off clothes. Steve Martin is joking at the table. Wynton Marsalis played trumpet on the first-floor studio. You go on to tell us about Susan Sarandon and Julia Roberts comparing colonoscopy stories over brunch at the dining room table. And this is big material. So, this is hard for a writer, actually, because you’ve got to keep on the path of writing a narrative tale and not let everybody else get in the way. So was that a struggle for you?
Alice: No. I’m surprised at myself for that answer.
Marion: Good.
Alice: Listen, a lot of it, living it was hard. Not the privileged part, obviously, but being flooded by the sort of torrential desires of all of the people around me, my mother and father being these outsized characters who abstracted everything. And as I later suffered from dissociative disorder, that’s what was hard to live it. And it was precisely the challenge of finding the right words, finding the right way to structure it, that kept me from getting completely lost in other people’s stories in the void of my dissociated brain. So even when it was a challenge, it was that challenge that was lifesaving.
Marion: Great answer. And you do a really good job of going in and choosing details, the hardest of which are going to be to choose details to describe yourself. And when describing your young self, there were two remarkable details that I just found breathtaking. Young, you are listening to audio books, and you’re thinking in the third person. I know what I took away from these details as a reader, but talk to us about choosing them and what you intended the reader to know.
Alice: That’s a really great question. It’s probably because they were the two things that saved my young life. When I was self-harming, cutting, at the age of seven, when I was trying to find a way to metabolize the chaos around me and inside me, those two details kept me alive. And they are still such a part of how I move through time and consciousness, that they are me, and they are how I do everything I do, from talk to you to write. I still think in the third person sometimes. I still listen to my childhood audio books.
Marion: It’s perfect. It shows us the distance that does become the dissociation. It heralds that onset, and yet it also provides this comfort. I found myself kind of carrying them both into the narrative, like two pearls in my pocket that I could kind of worry through the whole thing, like a worry stone. And you do this really difficult thing, too, with the truth, because one of life’s great debates, no doubt about it, is whether we are the product of the stories we tell ourselves or if we’re the product of the stories others tell us. And so this whole idea of story is just huge in this book.
Your mother’s stories of her own upbringing include very frightening tale of pedophilia that you write, quote, “was an excuse for everything. She couldn’t give me affection or talk about feelings because pedophile Satanists had ruined her. She drank because she had witnessed murder and endured torture. I couldn’t have her because the abuse had taken most of her away. And what remained belonged to her work.” Wow. Your father had stories about everything. They’re commanding, as is his attention toward you. And ultimately, you write and resolve this idea that your mother was probably a victim of what we know now as Satanic panic, a sort of hysteria that swept the nation in the ’80s and ’90s. But that leaves you ultimately not knowing what was true. So let’s talk about that. How do we write into the unknown? This stops a lot of writers. I talk to writers all day long, in my job as a coach and an editor, and yet you walked right into it. “I can’t know, but here’s what I think.” So talk about the decision to write into what you could not know.
Alice: Well, I think it’s interesting. I think that’s how I feel my role as a memoirist is. And it’s very similar to the dissociative experience, an experience where I want to get back to myself but also escape myself. I think writing is a way to get distance and to dig in. And I think what I learned as a memoirist and as a liver of life is that my responsibility and the challenge is to show how many, many things can be true at the same time, how many incompatible, contradictory things can be true at the same time, and how to remain coherent at the center of that understanding and that experience.
Marion: Yeah. You have this great quote where you say, “Words were the only thing that tethered me to some splinter of myself.” And later, you saw your father’s own struggle to free himself of his story. So, in many ways, story is the main character of this book, its power, its sway. When, in the name of all that is holy, did that occur to you to do?
Alice: It’s only occurring to me right now that I did it, actually.
Marion: That’s why I love these conversations.
Alice: So, thank you.
Marion: You’re welcome. No, it really is. It’s the main character.
Alice: Yes.
Marion: And I loved it, and I thought, “Oh, man, I can’t wait to talk to her on that decision.” So-
Alice: Well, it’s interesting. I am constantly marveling at how much poetry and how many parallels are just lying scattered around my life. And this book has really showed that to me in a really moving way. I mean, whether we’re talking about an intestinal worm in a mental hospital as an ersatz soul, which is its own scene, whether we’re talking about how my mother’s close-to-final words about the ocean… and that really demonstrated her alienation… I’m just amazed at the fact that my life seemed to sort of present itself to me as this perfectly packaged story. And then, maybe I’m not giving myself enough credit as the person who wrote it, but I’m gobsmacked at how life has so much poetry, and I just feel grateful that I have this job where I get to collect it like gorgeous seashells and arrange it on the mantel.
Marion: And I think the humility and gratitude for the creative life is so important and will help you forever, I’m sure. And it’s interesting that you can say that about the seashells, about some of these details. You just referred to the worm that you discover when you’re in a mental hospital. And not all of these details are beautiful, but they are beautiful to behold, even and including the way you describe your own dissociative state, the way you describe cutting yourself. You begin when you’re seven, as you said before. In adolescence, you experience a loss of self, and it’s not beautiful in the way you describe it so that it’s going to entice anyone else to do this. I don’t want to be misunderstood. But this is the hardest stuff to write because how do we write about that in interior dissolve. Right?
And you write about the dissociation, the medications, the hospitalization. It’s very tough territory to navigate. And it only works if the writer can meet it with transparency that doesn’t border on a diary-like telling of the moment-to-moment. And you do it successfully. So, my audience is writers, many of whom are reporting on their own mental health experience. So talk to me about the eye to look back at yourself from here. How do you keep it on there without flinching, without fear, and with some degree of laying it out on a mantelpiece like beautiful seashells?
Alice: Well, I’ll tell you something funny. It was not the agony that was the hard part to write about. It was the happy parts, honestly. And I don’t know if that’s just a me thing. I’d be really curious to hear. But there was almost a safety, and maybe it’s just because I’m such a curious person, but trying to describe the dissociative state was, as I had said previously, was the only thing that kept me from getting lost. And I remember vividly being in a locked ward, the first locked ward I was in, and I was having a dissociative episode, and I had crawled underneath the sink and I was banging my head against the wall, screaming my own name over and over again. And a nurse came in, and she said, “You’re scaring the other patients.” And I described what was happening, and she said casually, “Oh, it sounds like you’re dissociating.” And I felt for one moment like I wasn’t falling through infinite space, when I heard that word.”
If any word in this book can do for someone else what that word, “dissociation,” did for me in that moment, I’ll be happy. And I think it was that feeling of responsibility and also, honestly, the need to describe it to myself that made it not really an issue of whether it was hard or whether it was easy. It was just, “This is important. This is what I have to do.” And nothing gives me more pleasure than putting words to seemingly untranslatable moments. So it was, as I guess cutting was for me, both pleasure and pain at the same time.
Marion: Well, that moment where the nurse gives you that word is portrayed rather like going from a zoom lens to a microscopic view. We feel you inhabit yourself at that moment. I thought it was gorgeous.
Alice: Thank you.
Marion: I thought it was breathtaking. I really did feel like someone just took the zoom lens and went… and put me right there because-
Alice: Me too, when I lived it. Yeah.
Marion: Right? Because you did. And that’s what you allowed. When we get language for ourselves, we get a little bit of control.
Alice: Well, it’s super interesting you say that, because part of what this book is about is, yes, when we get language, we get control. But also, as we see in my experience with the psychiatric community, I’m told many other things that create this toxic, near-deadly tangle in me.
Marion: Yes.
Alice: I’m told that I was molested. I’m told that I’m supposed to be on medications the rest of my life. I’m told that I have this diagnosis, that diagnosis. So, I think that’s what I really tried to do, was inhabit all of those moments where stories can destroy but they can also save.
Marion: Yeah. There you go. And I think you do it. And at a point in this book, you begin writing this book, and I loved that. I was like, “Okay, let’s get complicated.” Now we think dissociative disorder, two flamboyant parents, people coming in and out of the house, that’s complicated. Yeah. Well, now let’s bring in the story of writing, and while we’re writing. And we enter the world of the book to some degree, and that’s interesting. But technically, it’s really difficult because you’re now, the writer, forced to transfer from writing about the past to writing in real time. In other words, your mother died only last year, meaning that you were reporting on much of this while she was succumbing to Alzheimer’s, to Leukemia. And my question is, were you taking notes? Help me out. Talk to me about writing in real time after looking out over the landscape of your past.
Alice: Yeah, that’s a great observation, how it transitions into that later in the book. I’m a great believer in just write, and write all the time. And I got that from my mom. The only advice she ever gave me was, “Just do the work.” And I was taking a lot of notes, and I was even writing next to her as she was dying. And that was the only sound she could tolerate, was my typing. And it’s a way I get to emulate her, in a non-destructive and non-alienating way. But really, the writing of it, it’s interesting. Going back to the title, the title really helped me. It was a beacon. It was a guiding principle. So I was taking a lot of notes, and I was writing to process it.
And I think also, a really helpful part of this is that, yes, right in the moment, right in the pain, have an angry draft, have a poor-me draft, have a sentimental draft. But what’s so funny is that everything in this industry takes so much longer than I think it should but exactly as long as it needs to because I was protected from myself by everything taking so long. So as long as I wrote… And I wrote stuff that never, ever should see the light of day, but it allowed me to have all this exquisite defined strata that I wouldn’t have had if I had just written later on in hindsight, in a calmer moment. But I had the padding of my incredible editor, but also just I get to sit with this afterwards.
Marion: That’s lovely and thoughtful. Whenever I interview a memoir writer, I always ask him this one question, which is, what are we asking a memoir writer to do when we ask her to go back and inhabit a traumatic past? Are we asking her to reanimate it? Are we asking her to relive it? Are we asking her to look coolly from here? And so with this great landscape that you do, first you look at the past, then you literally write in real time, what do you think we’re asking of you? Or what were you asking of yourself? Are you reanimating? Are you reliving? Are you reporting on it coolly? Or what is your language for what this process is?
Alice: Well, I think my best answer is something I already answered, which was, I really think it reminds me of the dissociating and being able to acknowledge that so many things can be true at the same time and not to break down into incoherence, not to lose your center. So I mean, if I can just repeat myself, which is not the best, but I think living and then communicating that so many seemingly infinite things can be true at the same time and remaining coherent at the center of it and continuing to connect because I think a lot of this process for me, in the beginning, was really, I was just trying to stay alive. And it was insular. It was dark. And then I gradually turned outward, and I connected with my mother, looked after her. I listened to my father and reunited with him. I’m in an incredible relationship with my husband, who also helps me edit, which is its own funny story.
And this book is a living… It continues to do the work. It continues to kind of live its message of turning outward and connecting. And I’m connecting to myself. I’m inching my way towards wholeness, and that’s all I can really hope to do.
Marion: No, it’s beautifully put. And I would love just a little insight into what you just mentioned with your husband and editing. I know from reading the story what kind of support your husband has provided in your life, but talk to us just a little bit about getting the writing support in a marriage.
Alice: Oh.
Marion: That’s interesting.
Alice: Oh, oh. I’m just so grateful. So this is my editing process. I have read this manuscript, in all of its iterations, out loud to him seven times.
Marion: Oh, I love this man.
Alice: Oh, God, you and me both. So I will. I’ll read it aloud. And he paces back and forth. And then he goes, “Wait, what are you trying to say?” And then we shout sentences at each other until one of us goes, “Ah, that’s it.” And then we high-five.
Marion: You just improved the marriages of every writer listening to this, if they can get their person to listen. Reading aloud is the single greatest thing you can do, whether you do it alone… For those people who don’t live with someone else, read your stuff aloud to yourself. Don’t edit it while you’re doing it, necessarily. Just read it aloud to see how it sounds. Just try that first. But listen to what Alice just said. I love the, “We’re having the discourse. We’re discussing what it’s about, and then we’re having the high-five.” That’s gorgeous.
Alice: Exactly right.
Marion: That’s wonderful. Well, as we wrap this up, which I would prefer not to do, but I know that you’ve got other interviews to do… And I really, really want to thank you, first of all, for writing this book. I learned so much. I loved it.
Alice: [inaudible 00:21:01].
Marion: And I was really honored to be part of your cure, your change, your process, your transcendence. And I felt like I was with you, and that was deeply intimate. But of all the people I’ve ever interviewed, you may be the very best one to ask this last question. People talk about the therapeutic process of writing memoir, and you’ve touched on this several different ways. I always say to people, “It’s the single greatest portal to self-discovery.” Flannery O’Connor has been quoted about what it does for her. Everybody’s been quoted about what it does for them, but that we write to discover ourselves. So what is it in the act of writing that provides a story of ourselves that we can live with?
Alice: Oh, wow. It’s so interesting because I feel as if… I mean, I feel so grateful to have what sometimes feels like a shortcut to catharsis, but it also feels like the endless scenic route. So-
Marion: In a convertible.
Alice: Yeah, exactly. Sometimes in the dead of winter, but sometimes in the summer. So yeah, highly uncomfortable, but also just the best feeling in the world. So I don’t know if I have an answer to the question beyond that because I don’t know, and I don’t know if I ever want to find out, if that makes sense.
Marion: Makes perfect sense.
Alice: Because this is such a mystery, what I do, there are certain things, certain rules I follow, or un-rules. I’ll commit to badness, for lack of a better word. I’ll stop being precious with myself. There are certain rules and certain things, but honestly, I don’t want to perforate the mystery. I don’t think I do. And I think the moment I have a better answer is not a moment I want to encounter. I’d like to not know for a little longer and see if I can play in the mystery as long as possible.
Marion: Well, you just go right ahead. We will look forward to whatever you choose to write next. But in this case, you done a great job. I’m very grateful for the work. I’m very grateful to meet you, and thank you. It’s a lovely book, and I wish you all the best with it.
Alice: Thank you so much, Marion. This was such a thrill, and I’m so grateful. Thank you.
Marion: You’re so welcome. The writer is Alice Carrière. See more on her at alicecarriere dot com. The book is Everything/Nothing/Someone, just out from Spiegel & Grau. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Adam Clairmont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marionroach dot com, the home of the Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes in how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.
Want more help? Come see me in any one of my online memoir classes.
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