SARAH LABRIE IS A TV writer, librettist, and memoirist whose new memoir, No One Gets to Fall Apart, is just out from HarperCollins. Listen in and read along and she and I discuss how to write memoir about family mental illness, and so much more.
Powered by RedCircle
Marion: Welcome, Sarah.
Sarah: Hi, so happy to be here.
Marion: Well, it’s a lot of fun to have you here because I love this book and I cannot wait to jump in and talk to you about the writing of it. So let’s do so. How we resolve the great good hope that we have to honor our families, but leave them and be our own selves. This is the fine inquiry of this book for which you trace your family history of mental illness from the dysphoria that plagued your great grandmother, a granddaughter of slaves, to your own experience with the depression, while living a full and productive life as a creative. Talk to me about finding, owning, giving yourself permission perhaps to write with such candor.
Sarah: Oh, wow. Thank you. Yeah, I really appreciate everything that you just said, but I, the way that this book started was that I was trying to write a different book, a novel called The Anatomy Book, and it was about time travel and the multiverse. And it was kind of based on this philosopher that I had been obsessed with and done years and years of research on.
And it just, I was kind of spiraling. I was kind of just drifting in this open sea of not really be able to make this narrative cohere. And then I found out that my mom, who I hadn’t spoken to in a couple of years, had been found on the side of the road screaming because she thought people were chasing her and was now institutionalized.
And I was just thrust so immediately out of the world of fiction and into the present that the only thing I could do was write about it. I just didn’t, I didn’t know how else to handle what this massive disruption and my mother’s life and my life and our family’s life.
And I just started out by kind of writing out how I was feeling and these little vignettes and then sort of gradually they became a book. But I can’t say at any point that I was writing with any sort of sense of how it would come together or real, a real sense of like, this will be a book that will exist in the world.
It was something I just kind of had to feel my way through.
Marion: Well, you mentioned that novel. And honestly, one of the most fascinating things about this memoir, and there are many fascinating things about it, is how you weave in your writing life with the reality that your mother is experiencing a schizophrenic break. And the opening pages, after we established your mother’s crisis, where you see you sort of ripping apart a novel, that novel that you’re working on, and a page or two more as you’re driving into kind of more into the teeth of your mother’s crisis, you get an idea for a short story.
And, you know, writers live like this. Things come in the window, they sneak under the door, they come into our heads. And this whole story, and your writing life together, more than telling us your height, age, weight, education level, or any other way to characterize you, shows us creative ambition as who you are. And I just bowed my head. I have to say, I loved this characterization, this putting this story and story struggle up top. So, when you went to edit and after this was a book, you realized that this was a book, a memoir specifically, talk to me a little bit about using your writing as part of the device of writing this book.
Sarah: Yeah, I mean, so No One Gets to Fall Apart is very much about what it was like for me to be raised by a mother who had borderline personality disorder when I was a kid and developed schizophrenia late in life when I was in my 30s and she was in her 50s.
And I think I want to sort of answer your question directly. I feel like I’m circling it, but I want to like actually give you a good answer. But OK, so I’ll say this. I’ll say that I had a very difficult childhood because my mother was not well. But the one sort of consistent thing was I read constantly.
She read constantly. I wanted to be a writer and she loved that I wanted to be a writer. So not only was I sort of I would use novels, I read constantly as like a way of dissociating because my home life was really difficult sometimes, but also because it was sort of like the one good thing we had between us, you know, like she would take me to the library with her while she was studying for her nursing and licensing exams.
And then I would read Stephen King books when I was way too young. And, you know, she would read them, too. And I just have really those are some of my happiest memories. So as I got older and had more control over my life and my time, I kind of took this like almost monastic vow.
I was an aesthetic. I was like, I am going to be a writer and I have no other option. This has to work out. So when it started to not work out, when when the anatomy book, the novel was failing, I was losing all sense of self. And so that I was trying so hard to hold on to that identity as a writer.
And I think that is that struggle and that tension is kind of what colors a lot of the narrative voice of this book.
Marion: I love that. And I and I get that. And I and I wonder if we can just go a little deeper. You have an exquisite eye. The things you see that you noticed and that you’re also able to get onto the page are beautiful, interesting, exquisite. They fit, they’re faceted.
They make the reader, you know, have little… Before we went live, I talked to you about reading the end of it and actually gasping. And I had that experience several, more than several times. And I wonder if you have any thoughts on if growing up the way you did, specifically, if trauma develops an eye in particular that a less traumatic life experience might not, or if it’s something else that entirely sharpens that lens of yours.
Sarah: I wonder. I mean, I hadn’t thought about it like that, but I know that as somebody who is friends with people whose parents dealt with addiction or especially alcoholism, when you were in a situation with a volatile parent, you are attuned to their emotions at all times.
Marion: Yes.
Sarah: And so, as you get older, you can’t turn that off. I am always aware of, like, I’m always engaged emotionally with everyone around me and always trying to get a sense of what levels people are at, if someone’s angry, if someone’s upset, if I need to take care of someone.
And that’s a form of neuroticism that can sometimes make just interacting in the world really difficult, but it does, it makes you very, very observant. And it does help a lot when it comes to building characters and sort of fully nuanced voices and people that maybe I wouldn’t necessarily have a lot in common with in terms of life experience, I can understand emotionally. So in that sense, yeah, I do think trauma is helpful to, I’ll say, my personal development as a writer.
Marion: Yeah, I get that completely. I had an alcoholic mother and my husband will say to me, “Oh, what are you doing,” when we’re in a restaurant? And I’ll say, “Well, there’s someone about eight tables away who’s breaking up with someone else.” I just know that.
He always looks at me like, “Oh boy, I just came here for the food.”
Sarah: Exactly. My husband is the same way. He’s always like, “Tune in,” because he can tell that I am listening in to everyone else’s conversation around us and just trying to gauge how other people are feeling. And he’ll be like, “no, like, we’re here together right now. And that’s, that’s okay. You don’t have to take care of strangers. You don’t have to be thinking about how strangers are feeling all the time,” but you can’t not, you know.
Marion: I think you’re helping a lot of writers listening to this right now. I think that accepting what we are packing, what we have on us, the skills we have that sometimes in other aspects of our lives can get in the way. But, you know, to really drill into the ones that help us as writers is just a really, really beneficial thing to think about.
So, I appreciate that answer. That was a good one. So, everyone will ask you about this. Probably everybody already has. So let me be the next. And remember that my audience is writers who will talk themselves out of writing every day for every single reason, but definitely will not let themselves write if they think their book has been successfully done by somebody else.
So, of course, Jeanette Walls begins her uber-successful memoir, The Glass Castle, spotting her mother rooting in a dumpster. Your first line informs us that your mother was found, quote, “on the freeway, parked honking her horn, her car filled with notes in which she outlined federal agents’ plans to kill her.”
So did you or anyone else try to talk you out of writing this book for that slender, and it is such a slender similarity, but I wanted, my point is to try to reassure those people listening to write their own stories because they’re so different. But I just wonder if you got any pushback about that book.
Sarah: Oh, that’s interesting. I mean, no, I think my agent saw it as an asset that that could be a comp, you know, as she was going out with the manuscript. And I know you probably can’t tell it from my voice, but for listeners, I’m a black woman and that didn’t really exist.
You know, there is obviously there’s The Glass Castle, there’s Educated, and those are books that I love, but I had not really been able to find a book like this one about three generations of black women and kind of the legacy of mental illness, which I traced in the book back to my ancestors who were enslaved in Georgia and came to Texas through Galveston and sort of how you build a life out of the wreckage of that genetic inheritance.
Marion: Yes.
Sarah: I looked, you know, and I read every memoir I could get my hands on. And I really, you know, the closest I found is maybe Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive. And I mean, you know, she’s Natasha Trethewey. I wasn’t really worried about treading on her territory because she’s this incredible poet.
I just, I was like, maybe I can be in conversation with her and Jesmyn Ward and that, you know, other women who have similar experiences, but not exactly the same thing. But to your point about writing your story, I mean, five people can have the exact same experience and every single person’s story will be different.
So there’s just never any, you never have to worry about that.
Marion: I think that’s absolutely true. And I wanna talk about that generational palpating that going all the way back the way you did, it’s beautifully done. And it’s also requires real vulnerability because we’re not talking about eye color, or we’re not talking about some kind of inheritance of a house or a thing.
We’re talking about an emotional and a mental health component that is traveling through the family. And so vulnerability seems to me to be the way we palpate back. But I don’t know what word you would use. What word would you use? I mean, was it a struggle to go back there and look for that at that? Or did it take multiple drafts to get to that place? What do you call it? Do you call it vulnerability? And just talk to me a bit about how you manage that.
Sarah: I mean, I thought of this book as kind of a mystery. I, you know, I really was just, it’s an investigation. I was trying to figure out why my mom had a psychotic break at 53, what that meant, how we had missed the signs, the conversations we weren’t having. So for me, it was like, I have to be as honest as I can, or I will never actually find an answer to the question that is the whole point of writing this book.
You know, I don’t, I’m not really worried about what other people think of me personally. And I’m saying that in regards to this question of vulnerability. But I do think the more honest I can be, the more, the more the story will resonate with other people for sure. And the more it’ll feel like it has value and a reason to exist.
Marion: Absolutely. I think memoir writing allows us to share our humanity. And it’s complex. I, my first book deals with my own mother’s Alzheimer’s disease. And she was very young. She was 49 when she got sick.
I’m very familiar with revealing details about one’s mother. And I’m also very familiar with the criticism that her friends ladled out relentlessly to me about her story being her story. And I shouldn’t have written her story and all of this. I disagreed utterly.
What about you? We wrestle constantly as memoir writers with whose story it is to tell. Did that in any way impede you, propel you? Just talk a little bit to those writers who are listening. When we write about someone other than ourselves, what the deal, what the transaction is.
Sarah: I feel very strongly that you own your own story and you are allowed to tell the version of the story that happened to you. And other people can write the version of the story that happened to them. I think I heard a writer say something like that on a panel once and I just fully adopted it as a kind of mantra.
I mean, this is my life. This is the version of what I lived that I am empowering myself to tell. And anybody who has a contradictory version of that story, fantastic. Write it down. I’ll read it. We’ll talk about it. But I own this and I get to have it. And I sort of fully have stepped into that and I’m trying to embody it with this book.
Marion: That’s so helpful. I say that to writers all the time. I work with memoir writers all day long. And I say to them, you’re allowed to say to your sister — I have a sister, her name is Margaret — and you say, “You’re right, Margaret. That’s not the way it happened to you.” That’s the way it happened to me. Sometimes we get on with it after that.
I used to teach or I used to facilitate book clubs as my job in LA. And I remember we read this novel, Warlight by Michael Ondaatje. And that entire book is about all the different versions of what it was like to live in London during the bombings. And he has a version and his sister has a version. And we as the reader take away a different version of what their childhood was like.
And everything you just said, he just organizes that so beautifully. And it’s something I’d really recommend to anyone who’s struggling with that question.
Marion: Yeah, he’s a master. And I love that. Thank you. That’s a great reference to give. So you have exquisite language for the mental illness of your mother, but also for your own depression. At one point writing about depression, quote, “I don’t know how to fight a disease that always means trying to outrun yourself.” So let’s talk about writing and what it allows. Specifically, let’s talk about achieving self-clarity perhaps. Did you know this about depression?
Is that a line you had in your head or did you figure out that that’s what depression is while writing it down? I think new writers struggle terribly with ownership and revelation, feeling like if they just discovered something, then like, how real can it be? Or is it original? I find, of course, that the writing itself is where I learn. I don’t know how I feel about anything until I write it down, that writing is wondrous and real. But chicken and egg, like that line for us, please, and how you learned what you know about depression and your mother’s illness.
You know, how did you, did that language come to you as you were working and then that knowledge came after that? Or was it knowledge that you first had and then wrote about it?
Sarah: I had been dealing with pretty severe depression on and off. And then after my mom’s diagnosis and her refusal to take medication or even ability to have any insight into her condition, you know, she was just getting worse and worse. I kind of hit whatever was below rock bottom. And I was just writing about it every day because I just needed to tell myself I wasn’t dead. Like I was still alive. And this is how I was feeling and I needed to express it. And those were just sort of in these like long journal entries. So, and I had been kind of keeping journals for decades and a lot of the writing about depression ended up being pulled from there and repurposed.
But I’ll say like, one thing about having a mother with borderline personality disorder is that when I was a kid, she was always either, either she was like trying to hurt me or she was treating me like I was the most important, smartest, most beautiful genius in the world. And I think it kind of gave me a complicated sense of my own ambition and abilities in that I don’t really question things like that. I don’t really question whether other people are gonna be like, “Oh, this isn’t right. Or this isn’t how it feels because this is how it feels to me.” And I don’t know, there’s a part of me that sometimes is like, am I just delusional like about my own abilities? And then has that just served me really well? That’s like a gift that my mom’s own mental illness gave me, I don’t know.
Marion: Yeah, well, it’s a fascinating thing to consider, right? What do we get from that? And whenever I have a memoir writer on, I always ask the same question. So I’m gonna ask you, when we go back and write about a trauma, what are we asking a writer to do? Are we asking her to re-inhabit it, reanimate it, relive it? Or are we asking her to coolly sort of stand here in the here and now and look back and report on it?
What do you think we’re doing as writers when we go back and write about a past trauma?
Sarah: I don’t think writing about trauma is different than any other writing. I think if you are a serious writer, you kind of have an obligation to write well, to write to the best of your ability, hopefully provide a sort of structured narrative if that’s what you’re trying to do. And if not, to have an intention that you are striving really, really hard to execute according to your own rubric for success, whatever that is. And that’s the same for a genre novel. It’s the same for a literary fiction. It doesn’t matter what it is. You just have to write it well so that you’re not wasting the reader’s time. And that was the most important thing for me.
I wouldn’t say that, writing this book was not a question of me sort of trying to do therapy on myself or reach catharsis or anything like that. I just, I’d always written and I tried to write a book and failed and then I tried to write another book. And I, if this had failed, I would have tried to write another book. It was sort of separate from that. Like the trauma itself is something that I deal with in therapy and with my friends and loved ones. It’s not something that I’m trying to fix by writing about it. This is a separate thing.
Marion: The conclusion to this book is masterful. So let’s talk about endings, happy and unhappy endings and endings that eschew that binary, and instead answer the question that the book asks. Yours is the latter, of course. And since you cannot fix your mother or cure her, I wonder if you wrestled at all in terms of how to wrap up this story. If you thought at any point, oh, it’s not gonna be a traditional happy ending.
Writers ask me about this all the time. Writers wrestle with this the whole time, but the way you handled this book — and I want everyone to buy it and read it so that they will get to see a master dealing with a very surprising and delightful and remarkable and masterful ending. But talk to me about going there. It’s not happy or unhappy. It’s not that, it’s something else. What is it?
Sarah: I think, so obviously the ending isn’t just the ending. It grows out of everything that you’ve placed in the opening and in the middle. And at some point, if the book is gonna work, it kind of starts taking off on its own and you’re kind of just along for the ride. You just show up at the desk and as long as you’re showing up, the book will be there and that path forward will be there. And I think that kind of carried me to this ending.
Not at first, it took several layers and I knew what I was trying to say and what I wanted to leave the reader with was what I had figured out, which is that the thing that will save you is love, and it’s other people, and it’s your friends and it’s your ability to take care of other people and your ability to be cared for. That is sort of, that’s it.
That’s the only, what’s that line? “We must love one another or die.” I can’t remember who said it, but that is sort of the thing that I kept coming back to in therapy, meditation, everything. And it was really just a question of, okay, how do I make it clear that that is what I have found as sort of the key to all of this? And it came to me in a workout class, I was doing like hot yoga or something, I don’t know. But I have been carrying this question around for weeks, if not months. And then at some point, the answer just popped into my head while I was doing tree pose. And that is because my subconscious had been working on it forever.
So, my advice to writers would be, just know that you are always working on your book. So, try and just keep those questions in mind. Just know that they can come from anywhere. The answers can come from anywhere at any time and you just have to be ready.
Marion: Such a great answer. I find that when I’m using that one knife in my kitchen drawer, that literally scares me to touch, that that’s when I get my answers because my brain is so engaged in not cutting my hands off, that it somehow flies around and puts together all those questions that I’ve been carrying but yes, you’re always working on it.
Absolutely.
Sarah: I love that. Yeah, I would love to hear. I just love hearing stories like, what is the thing? Is it walking the dogs? Is it the weird knife that you’re scared of? Like what is, is it waking up at three o’clock in the morning when your brain is not fully awake yet? I feel like every writer has to kind of figure that out at some point.
Marion: Yes. So as we wrap this up, I want to just talk about, I note that you were the recipient of several fellowships from wonderful writers retreats, particularly Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, with which I’m quite familiar. Your others include Ucross in Wyoming and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. And I will put links in the transcript to all of them so that the writers listening can go and have a look and consider their own need to apply. But talk to me a little bit about solitude, community, one or the other, both, and the mix you particularly seek to get the work done.
Sarah: I have to be completely alone when I’m drafting and the house has to be silent. And if I can convince my husband to leave the entire house, like even better, I really just need to not be, I need to be able to escape myself. I need to not feel like a physical body. So, you know, I need silence and I need no other incoming sensations. And that’s how I draft. And then I’ll share my work with my writing group or my friends or the teacher. And then from there, or my editor, you know, now I had such incredible editing at Harper and from my agent.
So a lot of it is community, but I have to have drafted the thing first. So all of those, all those residencies were me drafting and drafting and drafting and drafting over years. And then I sold it. And then the past, I don’t know, I sold it in 2021. So, the past three years I’ve been working on it with my writing group, you know, my husband read it and re-read it and even like did a copy edit pass. Like it’s once the thing exists and that’s when I really rely on community. And also, you know, try to be there for my friends who need me. I’ll read anybody’s book. Any of my friends ever, you know, they know that they can send me 200 pages and I’ll read it.
Marion: Perfect. Thank you, Sarah. I so enjoyed the book and I so enjoyed talking to you. I wish you the very best with all of your writing and thanks again for coming along today.
Sarah: Thank you so much. I’m so grateful. This was such a lovely conversation. I really appreciate it.
Marion: The author is Sarah Labrie. Get more on her at sarahlabrielivesinlosangeles dot com. The new book is No One Gets to Fall Apart, just out from HarperCollins. Get it wherever books are sold. 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 Jacqueline Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes and how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.
Want more help? Join me in live, online memoir classes
Start here, with The Memoir Project System Page, to understand the breadth of all the classes we teach.
Want to jump right in? Here’s a sampling of our classes.
Memoirama: Live, 90 minutes. Everything you need to write what you know.
Memoirama 2. Live, two hours. Limited to seven writers. What you need to know to structure a book.
How to Write Opinion Pieces: Op-eds, Radio Essays and Digital Commentary: Live, 90 minutes. Get your voice out into the world.
And keep in mind that I am now taking names for the next Master Class, the prerequisites for which are Memoirama and Memoirama 2. Live, once a month. Limited to seven writers. Get a first draft of your memoir finished in six months.
(Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)
Leave a Reply