Review by Booklist Review
LaBrie is in Los Angeles struggling to write a novel inspired by her fascination with Walter Benjamin when her grandmother, an attorney turned proprietor of a natural health-care business, calls from Houston. LaBrie's mother is gripped by intensifying delusions, and her strange and alarming reactions have derailed her life as a nurse. This crisis launches LaBrie's f inely etched memoir of family, mental illness, and creativity. Her mother is not the only relative to suffer from disruptive aberrations and destructive behavior, a pattern LaBrie found herself enmeshed in as well. Writing with painstaking precision and radiant candor, LaBrie recounts her difficult childhood, struggles in college, being Black in majority white situations, various forms of therapy, and complicated relationships. As she traces her path to becoming a librettist, a television writer, and a memoirist, she takes measure of the repercussions of America's racial hate and violence and reflects on Benjamin's brilliant and prescient vision and tragic death by suicide while trying to escape the Nazis. LaBrie's intimate and vivid chronicle is haunting in its sorrow and beautiful in its daring and hope.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this spellbinding debut, Minx producer LaBrie reckons with her mother's mental illness and her own relationship to work. Raised in Houston's Third Ward by a loving but unstable and borderline schizophrenic mother, LaBrie escaped to college in Rhode Island on a scholarship. During her studies, however, she felt depressed and stuck, unable to finish a novel or shake off the rage instilled in her during her volatile childhood. She wrote poetry and short fiction, flitting listlessly between cities and readings throughout early adulthood, both propelled by and frightened of her writerly ambitions. After a series of ketamine therapy sessions and a particularly ridiculous reading at an indulgent art gallery, she realized that"following the literary world feels more and more like watching the fragile children of aristocrats gingerly explore their talents while their friends applaud and the world around them burns." She decided to write a TV pilot, taking her first wobbly steps toward a career in Los Angeles; meanwhile, she began to unpack the effects on her of her mother's behavior, and eventually ushered her into treatment. With unflinching honesty ("I am so terribly sick of cannibalizing my life for art") and lyrical prose, LaBrie elegantly captures the grunt work of self-acceptance. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME. (Oct.)Correction: A previous version of this review incorrectly stated that the author was born in Houston. She was born in San Francisco.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A memoir that faces failure head-on. In Labrie's raw account, there is the failure of her mother to parent her daughter without resorting to abuse. There is also her grandmother's refusal to seek medical help for her daughter's escalating mental health crisis. And LaBrie tells of battling her own mental health issues, making clear the danger she faced in having to parent herself. The author does a remarkable job presenting the ways in which our health care system has failed the women in her family. Much of the memoir focuses on LaBrie's sense of failure as a fiction writer. She owns up to feeling jealous of a friend who has become popular thanks to her own book: "At parties," she writes, "when people learn that we are close, they speak about her book in breathless tones: 'Oh, I love her.'But you don't even know her, I want to say back.Ilove her." LaBrie fears that a novel she is working on isn't more appealing because she is unwilling to give in to the pressure to write in a certain style: "I'm not postracial, but a Blackness that defines itself entirely oppositional is never a type of Black I learned how to be." Early on, LaBrie reasons that when faced with problems in life, "No one is allowed to fall apart." This memoir is her attempt to challenge that perspective. A bracing look at a writer's troubled past. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
