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In 2017, Sarah LaBrie was honing her craft as a television writer in Los Angeles when she received a call from her grandmother: LaBrie’s mother, a complex and occasionally frightening figure in her daughter’s life and memories due to her schizophrenia, had recently been admitted to a psychiatric hospital in LaBrie’s native Houston after being found in the grips of an episode on the side of a freeway. In No One Gets to Fall Apart, LaBrie’s often chilling yet deeply empathetic new memoir, she describes how she and her family arrived at that agonizing moment, as well as her experiences as a Black woman at a predominantly white Ivy League school and feeling like a failure as a writer in Hollywood, where it seemed like everyone else had it all figured out.
Vogue spoke to LaBrie about writing toward healing, taking inspiration from James Baldwin and Terese Marie Mailhot, and balancing the writing of what she calls a “trauma memoir” with working in TV.
Vogue: What does it feel like, having this book out in the world?
Sarah LaBrie: That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot, because I have all these quotes from different writers up in my office and one of them is from Tracy K. Smith, about the sense of shame you can carry because of the complications that your identity raises for others. I was really worried about the fact that I’m a Black woman who went to white schools but is deeply rooted in her Black Texas heritage, and has kind of nuanced views on things like rage and the sort of commercialization of identity, and the way that I felt like my own identity was being commodified for these sort of big-market forces.
Some people were complicit in that, and some of those people had the best of intentions, but there was a sort of essentializing around what it meant to be a Black woman in the world, especially in the period right after Trump first got elected. I was kind of scared to write honestly about that because I didn’t want to piss anyone off. I didn’t know if people were going to agree with me, or be mad at me, or what. [But] people are meeting my story with great curiosity and are having these nuanced and smart conversations. I think that was something I hoped for, but also feared wouldn’t happen. The positive response and the fact that people are willing to come to events and be in this sort of physical, welcoming, warm space around other people and talk about these extremely difficult issues has been really life-affirming and healing for me—and also, I hope, for the people who participate in them.
You share such a compelling vision of generational trauma among Black women and also present a vision of healing. What did that journey look like for you in terms of resources?
I mainlined all of James Baldwin’s nonfiction before I wrote this book. I read it all when I was in grad school, and then I just went back to my notes and was pulling lines out as inspiration. He’s also a figure in the book, and his sort of openness and honesty was huge. The way he wrote about his father, who was mentally ill but his family didn’t know–they thought, because he was a pastor, that these were religious visions he was having until he basically starved to death in an institution because he was so sick. Baldwin outlines that process and everything that happened with his family and his father, and in Notes of a Native Son, he writes: “To be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at, but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people.” I feel like that line is at the heart of his work because he’s like, “Okay, I realize I’m at the mercy of other people’s interpretations of me, but if other people are going to tell me what they think about me, I’m going to tell them about me. I’m going to tell my own story, and that is going to matter just as much.” So that was sort of the biggest guide in figuring out how to put all this together and being brave about it.
I’d say the other book that was hugely helpful and that I felt gave me permission to write deeply private things about my family and myself was Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot. She’s just so fearless in the way that she writes about inheritance and inherited trauma and wanting to live a better life for her own children. I used to follow her on X, and I love the way she writes about being willing to fight other people if they try to tell you you can’t tell your own story; like, you are allowed to fight for your story. That is something that I feel like I like taped to my wall while I was writing this book, and just looked at all the time.
If you grow up in a household with a mentally ill loved one who also has power over you, as I did with my mother, you have people in your circle and your family who are incredibly well-intentioned, but who are also not verbalizing what’s actually going on, because maybe they think it’s safer for you, or it’s just too sad, or it’s something they are not able to see or confront because they’re also in this person’s orbit. So you grow up with this sense of cognitive dissonance—of, you know, “I think this is what’s happening, but everyone around me is acting like that’s not what’s happening, so what’s happening?” I think the cure for that is to write the truth, but it’s not easy and you need support. You need examples. And I think, for me, Terese was that.
In terms of craft, how did it feel to write such an intensely personal story? Did you find a flow, or did you have to step away at times to preserve your emotional health?
I did not preserve my emotional health. [Laughs.] One of the through lines in this book is this novel that I was trying to write, The Anatomy Book, that was a time-travel campus novel about an affair between a graduate student and his teaching assistant who was also his research assistant, and was trying find the equations for multiverse travel as laid out by a French philosopher during the Revolutionary era. It didn’t work for a number of reasons, but I had sort of organized my entire self around writing that book and publishing it, and I was so distraught when it didn’t work out, but I still had that drive. The memoir kind of took its place, and all of the energy and all the dedication and all the time and all the emotional energy just poured into writing this book, to a degree where I don't even think I was taking my emotions or myself into account. It was like, when I was writing, the writing replaced whatever self or emotions or personhood that I had. It was hard, and it was not a healthy place to be. I’m sure it was really difficult for my friends and for my husband. It took a while to get to the end, because I was having to take months off at a time to do my comedy TV writing job, which was impossible to do at the same time as I was basically writing a trauma memoir.
Is there anything you wish people understood better about schizophrenia, or mental illness more broadly?
I think something that I didn’t understand before was how afraid people are of people with schizophrenia. People are often under the impression that people living with schizophrenia will be violent or cause them personal harm or are dangerous, and, like, the idea that somebody could be afraid of my mom, even though she was emotionally very scary…she’s five feet tall. She’s tiny. And, yes, she has delusions, and she’s deeply mentally ill, and she has caused damage. But I do want people to understand that she’s suffering way more than you are. It’s made me too much more empathetic in terms of the unhoused crisis in Los Angeles; these are people who aren’t trying to hurt you, and who need help.
My mom would probably have wound up living in an encampment if not for our family, and the fact that my grandmother had a place for her to stay, and that, you know, my grandmother and my aunt were able to make her food and care for her. My mother is college-educated, has graduate degrees, and has all of the middle-class trappings that you’re supposed to have, but the only difference between her and someone living under the highway is that when she was sick, my family was there. So it just made me have a lot more compassion for people in that state who don’t have those support systems. I really would love for other people to think about that as well, and just to remember there’s no difference between you and those people. Things can change at any time.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
