New York Times Editor’s Choice * Indie Next Pick * Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction 2023 * Kirkus Best Nonfiction 2023 * Amazon Best of the Month * B&N Most Anticipated * Jennette McCurdy Book Club Pick

A “remarkable” (New York Times Book Review) memoir that tells of a young woman’s coming-of-age amid glamour, excess, and neglect, and the love affair that, against the odds, allows her to save herself.

Alice Carrière grew up in a converted factory in Greenwich Village in the 1990s, an extravagant home based on the hyper-aestheticized vision of her artist mother, Jennifer Bartlett—with two studios, an indoor swimming pool, a rooftop garden with a koi pond, and multiple, cavernous rooms through which a steady stream of visitors flowed. Alice’s iconoclastic European father was a fleeting, atmospheric disturbance.

Alice grows up as a child living in an adult’s world, with little-to-no boundaries or supervision. As she enters adolescence, a dissociative disorder erases her identity, and overzealous doctors medicate her further into madness. In the absence of self, she inhabits various roles: as a patient in expensive psychiatric hospitals, the ingenue in destructive encounters with older men, a provocateur who weaponizes intellectual dazzle and outrageous candor—until a medication-induced psychosis brings these personas crashing down. Finally, a soulful connection with a generous and sensitive musician allows her to free herself from the pathologies that defined her and recognize her true self. With gallows humor and brutal honesty, Carrière has written a unique and mesmerizing narrative of emergence and, at last, cure.

"The memoir of Alice Carriáere, and her life growing up in the 90's, with adolescence bringing along more than the usual, with the spawning of her Dissociative disorder."--]cProvided by publisher.