A New York Times Editors’ Pick * A Lit Hub's "Most Anticipated" * An Oprah Daily "Best Book of Fall" * An Esquire "Best Memoir of the Year" * A San Francisco Chronicle "New Book for a Season of Change"

On a highway in Houston, Texas, Sarah LaBrie’s mother was found screaming at passing cars, terrified she would be murdered by invisible assailants. The diagnosis of schizophrenia that followed compelled Sarah to rethink her childhood, marked at turns by violence and all-consuming closeness.

Digging into the events that led to her mother’s break, Sarah traces her family history of mental illness, from the dysphoria that plagued her great-grandmother, a granddaughter of slaves, to her own experience with depression as a scholarship student at Brown. At the same time, she navigates a decades-long fixation on a novel she can’t finish but can't abandon, her complicated feelings about her white partner, and a fraught friendship colored by betrayal.

Spanning the globe from Houston’s Third Ward to Paris to Tallinn and New York to Los Angeles, No One Gets to Fall Apart is an unflinching chronicle of one woman's attempt to forge a new future through a better understanding of the past. 

Sarah LaBrie is the author of No One Gets to Fall Apart: A Memoir. Originally from Third Ward in Houston, Texas, she lives in Los Angeles where she works as a TV writer. She was most recently a producer on the HBO and Starz television show, Minx, and also wrote on Blindspotting (Starz), Made for Love (HBO MAX), and Love, Victor (Hulu/Disney). Her libretti have been performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall with music written by Pulitzer-prize winning composer Ellen Reid. Her fiction appears in Guernica, The Literary Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Sarah was nominated for Best Television Comedy Script at the 2024 Women's Image Network Awards for her episode of Blindspotting, "By Hook or By Crook". You can subscribe to her newsletter here.