Sarah LaBrie: On Understanding the Truth in Layers, Looking the Past Square in the Face, and Her Memoir ‘No One Gets To Fall Apart’

Sarah LaBrie’s lushly beautiful and emotionally riveting debut memoir, No One Gets to Fall Apart (HarperCollins, 2024) arrived in my mailbox on a Friday evening. By Saturday afternoon, I had devoured it whole. 

Beginning with her mother’s psychotic break on a highway in Houston, Texas and the diagnosis of schizophrenia that follows, LaBrie takes us on a poignant exploration of her family’s history of mental illness and a childhood marked by violence and trauma. As LaBrie takes steps to move into her future—in her writing, in her relationships, and her marriage—she realizes that in order to do so, she needs to push through a deep-set fear in order to confront her past. 

I had the chance to chat with Sarah over email about her writing life (LaBrie is a memoirist, librettist, and TV writer), where she draws her inspiration from, writing as a means of connection, and how sharing our stories helps us feel less alone. 

Barrie Miskin: How did you protect your mental and emotional well-being while writing No One Gets to Fall Apart?

Sarah LaBrie: My mother had her first psychotic break in spring 2017. My manuscript didn’t go on submission to editors until 2021. Then I revised it for two years after it sold. I was in counseling for that whole period and I even read sections of the book aloud to my current therapist to get her feedback. I wanted to make sure I had enough therapeutic distance to write about the past objectively. I dislike memoirs where the narrator is a kind of noble victim of circumstance. It was important to me to look the past square in the face, including at the things I’d done wrong. 

Some parts were harder  to write than others, but I was willing to suffer, honestly. I also did the normal things you’re supposed to do like daily meditation and physical exercise, which, I regret to inform you, made an enormous difference.

BM: Were there any particular challenges you faced when translating your internal experiences into a narrative that others could understand and relate to? 

SLB: When I started piecing together No One Gets to Fall Apart, I was actually trying to write a different book, a time travel novel called The Anatomy Book. I thought for sure that was going to be my debut. No One Gets to Fall Apart takes place during that dream’s slow collapse. That whole time, I was just sort of taking notes on what was going on in my life, the way I used to try to take notes on everything. 

There’s this thing that happens when you work on something every day where a kind of internal intelligence emerges. Suddenly, it’s like the piece is working on itself and you’re just there. When No One Gets to Fall Apart started to cohere—when I reread it and the sentences had an internal structure that made them all feel like pieces of one thing—I took that as a sign other people would get it. The work felt true to me as a human somehow and not just as its writer.

BM: Did you find the process of writing the memoir therapeutic in any way?

SLB: The writing is not necessarily therapeutic, but being read and understood is. When people reach out to tell me they relate to my story, even though I’m sad for them, it also makes me feel really hopeful. I don’t want any of us to think we’re alone. 

BM: What were some North Star books for you on the journey to writing your memoir? Were there any styles or structures you were modeling?

While I was drafting, I reread Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, Cat Marnell’s How to Murder Your Life, Jade Sharma’s Problems, and a lot of Sigrid Nunez. I wanted to write a book you could sit down and read all the way through without stopping. Then my editor, Jenny Xu, sent me Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey, The Book of Eels by Patrik Svensson, and Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Those books helped me figure out how to braid scientific research and memoir. 

I mainlined all of James Baldwin’s essays in graduate school. He’s always in my head. I once had a professor tell me to read W.G. Sebald and then read Nicole Krauss so I could figure out what she stole from him, and then steal that from her. I still reread Great House and Krauss’s short stories when I’m line-editing. The novel I’m trying to write in my memoir is about Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, so that was never far from mind. I was trying to find a style that paid homage to Benjamin’s collagic technique while still leaving room for a plot. 

BM: At what point in that process did you start conceiving of your experiences and relationship with your mother as a story that you wanted to write?

SLB: So like I mentioned, I was trying to write a novel called The Anatomy Book when I started No One Gets to Fall Apart. I was taking it very seriously, waking up early and writing first thing. I knew the first part of the book was good, but I’d gotten kind of lost.  After I got the call from my grandmother saying my mom was losing her mind, the whole thing just seemed so dumb. It was like I’d been using fiction to dissociate and all of a sudden I was being thrust back into the world. I couldn’t believe in The Anatomy Book as a project anymore. 

But I still had those writing hours built into my days. So I used them to write about what was happening to my mom. I don’t think I knew I was going to do that until I started doing it. I remember, years before, reading Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped and thinking, “I wish I could do that for the women in my family.” Somehow it hadn’t really occurred to me to try. 

When I started writing about my mom, I wasn’t really thinking then about whether or how I would use it, but I did have faith that if I wrote and kept writing, something would happen. I mean, I really wanted something to happen. I’d built my life around becoming a writer and I had a very clear sense of intentionality around that. 

BM: You write in so many different mediums—fiction, libretto—was your process different for writing a memoir?

SLB: They’re all so different! Libretto writing feels like this true, pure art form. I love the back-and-forth of it all and the people I get to meet through working in music. This fall I have a workshop performance of a Kindred adaptation I’m doing for the Apollo with the composer Billy Childs and I’m just so excited about all of it. There is no angst for me when it comes to writing libretti. It’s just pure collaborative joy. 

Fiction is either ecstasy or despair with no in between. Memoir writing turned out to be the most like TV writing for me. I worked off of a very solid, detailed outline. I was constantly sending new drafts to my editor, getting notes, then sending back a revision. The novel I was writing—maybe because it was literary fiction—just made me feel like I was drifting endlessly in the sea.  

BM: Are you someone who has a writing routine and writes every day, or do you write just when inspiration strikes?

SLB: I write best when I stick to a very strict routine and I tend to be really hard on myself when I break from that routine. I finished this book and the multiple revisions it needed because I used Cal Newport’s time-blocking method, where you write down everything you’re going to do each day and assign each task a time of day. It’s pretty awesome and it works. 

I got a little off my routine in the time between when the book went to print and now. The WGA went on strike and I got really into dog fostering and rescue and suddenly I was adopting a husky puppy. I have to organize my writing around making sure she gets her park time and her walks and everything else on the planet she could ever want, but honestly, she deserves it all and more, so it’s fine. While I was writing this, she bullied me off the couch so she could sleep in my spot. On my best days, I wake up, make coffee, write for a few hours, then take her outside for as long as we can both stand. 

I used to be really hard on myself, just miserable, when I skipped a writing day. I think it was good I was like that, because it helped me become the writer I wanted to be. Now I try to just remember I’ve proved to myself over and over that I can finish what I start, even if it’s difficult. Just because it’s not getting done right now doesn’t mean it won’t get done. 

BM: In terms of writing the book, did you rely on notes or diary entries from the period during your mother’s schizophrenic break? Was it mostly drawn from memory or other people’s accounts? How did you put the story together?

SLB: I kept journals through college and graduate school, so I had these massive, endless Word documents that I could comb through. I’d also tried to do a memoir project on my mother in college and I had those records. I called my aunt and grandmother a lot and recorded our calls, and I went home to visit multiple times to talk to my mother and find out what she remembered and why she thought what was happening was happening to her. I was also in touch with a friend of hers from childhood, Lance Blanks, who very graciously spoke to me about their relationship. A lot of the stories about my mom are stories my grandmother told me over and over as I was growing up. This book is me, as an adult, looking back at those stories and going, “Wait…”

My father-in-law, who is a developmental psychology professor, introduced me to a psychiatrist named Pam Cantor. She told me about books by Dan Siegel and Bruce Perry, who write about the science of childhood trauma in this really fascinating, accessible way. Suddenly I was like, “I’m not making this up! I’m not crazy! The stuff that happened to me was terrible and it’s happened to other people too! I have to tell everybody!” So I changed the original direction of the book with their research in mind. 

After that, it was a matter of working with Jenny on how to fit everything together. Early on, she picked out a line from my original draft where I write about understanding the truth “in layers.” She asked me what it would look like to use that idea as a guiding principle for the book’s structure. Once we figured that out together, everything else just clicked. 

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Sarah LaBrie is a writer from Houston, Texas. Her libretti have been performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall and her fiction appears in Guernica, The Literary Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She has held residencies at Yaddo, UCross and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She lives in Los Angeles where she has written for television shows, including Minx (Starz), Blindspotting (Starz), Made for Love (MAX), and Love, Victor (Hulu). She holds an MFA from NYU where she was a Writers in the Public Schools fellow.