Everything/Nothing/Someone to Allen & Unwin UK

Erika Koljonen, Editor at Allen & Unwin UK, has acquired UK & Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, in Alice Carrière’s literary memoir from Stephen Morrison at Susanna Lea Associates. Originally published in the US in August 2023 by Spiegel & Grau, Allen & Unwin UK will publish in demy trade paperback, eBook and audio on 29th February 2024. The memoir was named Publishers Weekly and Kirkus’s Best Nonfiction of 2023, as well as being picked for Jennette McCurdy’s book club.

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

 

Everything/Nothing/Someone is a literary coming-of-age tale in the tradition of Girl, Interrupted and The Bell Jar. In it, Alice Carrière tells the story of her ostentatious, lavish, bohemian but ultimately neglectful childhood in Greenwich Village as the daughter of a remote mother, the renowned artist Jennifer Bartlett, and a charismatic father, European actor Mathieu Carrière. 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. In adolescence, Alice begins to lose her grasp on reality 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, 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. She finds purpose in caring for her mother as she descends into dementia, 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.

 

Alice Carrière says,

‘I am thrilled that my memoir, Everything/Nothing/Someone, will be published by Atlantic Books. I am so moved by their enthusiasm for it and I’m eager to get it in the hands of readers in the UK.’

 

Erika Koljonen says,

‘I was blown away by the strength of Alice’s writing – it sucks the reader in and stays with you long after you’ve finished reading. She’s a phenomenal talent, balancing an evocative darkness with heart-wrenching humanity. This already feels like a classic of the genre – I see it finding new readers for years to come. I’m so excited to be publishing this incredible memoir in the UK.’