"Madness and Redemption in Everything Nothing Someone by Alice Carriére" by Erica Goss
“Can you forgive me?”
When Alice Carriére’s father uttered these words, he not only opened a door to healing the rift between himself and his daughter, but also to helping her recover from the dissociation and bipolar disorder she’d suffered from for most of her life.
Carriére’s 2023 memoir Everything Nothing Someone describes her unconventional upbringing as the daughter of renowned artist Jennifer Bartlett and German actor Mathieu Carriére. As a child, Alice Carriére lived in a huge house in New York City, with gardens and a swimming pool, where her parents entertained their famous friends, including Julia Roberts, Steve Martin, and Joan Didion. She describes her mother as being “beautiful in a smudged way” and New York magazine dubbed Bartlett “the Joan Collins of Soho.” Of her father, a “European sex symbol” who began acting at age thirteen, she writes, “He left people jarred and exhilarated, offended and compelled.”
Between these two self-absorbed parents Carriére grew up with few boundaries, adrift in a vast house where none of the doors had locks. Her mother spent her days shut up in her studio, painting. When her father, whose acting career took him to filming locations all over the world, was present, his attention included a steady stream of inappropriate comments.
Carriére began showing signs of mental illness at a young age, but neither parent was equipped to help her, much less recognize the trauma they themselves inflicted on their child. Carriére writes of a childhood of privilege and neglect, where the house was stocked with enough food to last months, but her mother’s attention was in short supply. In this place where a paid staff attended to her material needs, she grew up lonely, confused, and lacking emotional stability.
Divided into three sections that mirror its title, “Everything,” “Nothing” and “Someone,” the book, like many madness memoirs, traces the life cycle of a mental breakdown: what led up to it, then a period of illness, and finally the recovery. Carriére’s book, however, differs from most madness memoirs in that it includes the powerful, unlikely component of forgiveness.
Madness memoir doesn’t often address the topic of forgiveness. The current thinking regarding mental illness focuses less on assigning blame and more on helping people live what doctors, therapists, and countless pharmaceutical company brochures call “the best lives possible.” People with mental illnesses hear the mantra “take your medications and go to therapy” repeated endlessly, as if these two actions alone were enough to ensure mental stability. Often, medical professionals tell them that their illness is the result of faulty “brain chemistry,” a theory as yet unproven, as if their minds were lacking, or over-producing, some key ingredient. As Carriére’s memoir details, however, so much more determines the possibility of healing.
Dissociation, one of the conditions Carriére’s doctors diagnosed her with, is usually a response to trauma, and, as in Carriére’s case, can become completely debilitating. Carriére calls it “a horrifying depletion.”
The book opens with a scene seemingly made to induce dissociation: her mother’s ghostly voice on the house intercom, an eerie, unsettling experience for Carriére as a child: “She could reach me, but I couldn’t reach her. By the time I found her she didn’t seem to care why she had called in the first place. Maybe my mother was just a voice in my head. Maybe I was just a figment of her imagination.” The young Alice wanders the empty rooms of the gigantic house where her mother paints all day, and a staff looks after the tasks of daily living. “In this house no one could tell the difference between fantasy and reality, art and object, parent and child. In this house, I couldn’t tell what I was to my mother. I couldn’t tell if I was my father’s daughter, wife, or mother.”
At age seven, Carriére began cutting herself. The relief cutting brought her was palpable, as well as instinctual: “I didn’t know how I had known to cut myself to feel better; I had never heard about self-harm.” A powerful concoction of “deposits, cavernous compartments where the disembodied voices of my parents echoed” brews in her seven-year-old brain. These voices expose her to “things I shouldn’t know, chanting the desires and fears that ruled them, until I couldn’t tell the difference between my voice and theirs.” As the years progress, her dissociation grows stronger. Eventually, as a young adult doctors diagnose her with bipolar disorder.
Carriére’s illness appears to be a perfect storm of genetics, environment, and the volcanic force of her own personality. “I was a hyper-talkative kid and had inherited my mother’s loud voice, her stubborn will, and her need to occupy to capacity any room she was in. When words failed me, I threw powerful tantrums, stomach on the floor, limbs flailing.” Her position as the only child of privileged, creative parents did not protect her from mental illness. In fact, being the child of these particular parents probably magnified her chances of becoming ill. Carriere’s mother and father seem spectacularly inept at the basic tasks of parenting. For example, every year Bartlett redecorated her daughter’s room as a birthday gift, effectively removing all traces of Carriere’s presence. Carriere had no say in this annual event; she was forced to adapt to whatever design her mother came up with, creating a “new girl this unfamiliar room belonged to.” Her father, Mathieu, seemed incapable of stemming the flow of cringe-inducing comments that issued from him. When Carriere was seven, he asked her to “lick the tears from my eyes;” at the age of eleven, he told her she had “a great ass.” Between her mother’s silence and her father’s “burning wall of information,” Carriere’s own personality was in danger of being obliterated.
When Carriére was twenty-five years old, a therapist convinced her that her father had molested her as a child. It wasn’t too difficult to believe—after all, this was the father who had serious boundary issues, who blurred the lines between appropriate and inappropriate behavior, and who spoke in detail about his own sex life in front of his daughter. In one particularly awkward situation when Carriére, then fourteen, found herself alone in a cab with him, his body pressed against hers in an uncomfortable embrace. This scandalized the cab driver, who asked if they were newlyweds. Her father laughed, but the driver persisted, clearly rattled by Mathieu’s decidedly unfatherly display of affection, adding “I would never hold my daughter like that.” At that moment, Carriére realized that “my father’s hands, placed just so, could change entirely who I was, turning me from daughter to newlywed.”
Though by marred Mathieu’s confusing behavior, Carriére and her father managed to have a close, loving relationship. While Carriére was growing up, they spent time together in Germany with Mathieu’s family, traveled to filming locations where he was working as an actor, and shared a deep attachment as father and daughter.
But due do Mathieu’s never-ending stream of sexually charged comments, Carriére wondered if her father was physically attracted to her. (Later in the book, he insists he never was.) As a vulnerable teenager, she began to base her sense of self-worth on the value of that attraction. How did her father really feel about her? Did he see her as a daughter or as a newlywed?
The therapist, whom Carriére calls Diane, persuaded Carriére that “any dark pockets of non-memory were significant and sinister.” In other words, anything Carriére was unable to remember was a blocked memory of abuse. Eventually, Diane coaxed a false statement from Carriére— “I was molested”—and told her to permanently block her father from her life. Carriére tried to accept this new identity as a “molested survivor repressing memories,” but even though it offered a convenient reason for her mental instability, something didn’t seem right.
Years passed, and after several hospitalizations, Carriére’s life stabilized. She married and graduated from Columbia. Yet an ill-considered dose of CBD oil threw her into a crisis of dissociation. “I realized I was gone,” she writes. “I couldn’t locate myself anywhere. I was cartwheeling through a roaring emptiness.” Reeling in this latest mental health disaster, she had an insight about the terrible bind of dissociation: “the more I questioned it, the worse it would get.” During this dissociative state, which lasted for months, Carriére examined her life in minute detail. Desperate, grasping for a reason for her mental deterioration, she found, at last, something to focus on: the need to confront her father about the abuse her therapist had convinced her he was guilty of. As she told her husband, “I can’t keep going like this. I don’t want to have to kill myself. I need to do something drastic.” She contacted her father and he agreed to meet.
In Paris, Carriére and her father agreed to the ground rules for what they called “therapy sessions.” These rules included allowing each person to speak for thirty minutes without interruption, and “if it gets too heated or too difficult, either person can walk away at any time. Just say, ‘I need a break.’” These guidelines show how Carriére benefited from her years of therapy; even in the middle of a dissociative break, she was able to construct a way into healing.
Within these sessions, that lasted for several days, nothing was off limits. “I wanted to give you a chance to tell your side of the story,” Carriére told her father. This in itself is remarkable—how often does an adult get to confront her parent about the harm the parent caused and have that parent listen quietly? As a reader, I found myself humbled by the exchange between Carriére and Mathieu, how carefully they listened to each other (while consulting extensive notebooks each had kept over the years), how Mathieu willingly excavated his own painful memories, and, after days of trading stories with his daughter, admitted that his behavior had greatly exacerbated her stress and confusion. “I shouldn’t have said or done any of those things period, period, period. There’s no excuse. I’m totally shocked and ashamed.” Mathieu was no child molester, but a father whose reckless comments and unconventional beliefs had contributed to his daughter’s mental illness.
Moments like these—moments of openness, honesty, and compassion—are, unfortunately, mostly missing from madness memoir. Even more regrettably, these vital components occur far too infrequently in the treatment people with mental illnesses receive. Instead of kindness, these people are regarded with fear; instead of being welcomed into world of understanding, the most vulnerable, including those who behave in disturbing ways, as Carriére herself often did, are shunned.
Finally, Carriére revealed the terrible secret she carried with her for years: a recurring nightmare where her father rapes her in a hotel room. Hearing this, Mathieu broke down. “I had never seen him cry like this. An intimate, discreet cry that was not meant to be seen by others.” And then, those four words: “Can you forgive me?” This prompted a physical response in Carriére: “I felt my own body letting go, the fear and suspicion I had harbored for so long finally falling from me. I was proud of us…We laughed and closed our notebooks.”
Mathieu’s act of contrition completely alters the book’s outcome. Instead of the all-too-frequent bleak ending we’ve come to expect from madness memoir, Everything Nothing Someone concludes on an optimistic note. In Carriére’s search to recover from dissociation, she confronts and disarms the painful memories that hold her back.
The section dealing with Carriére and her father’s reconciliation comprises a few short chapters at the end of the book, but its power is unmistakable. Within these thirty pages, the two heal a lifetime of misunderstanding. With courage and not a little trepidation, Alice Carriére clears a path forward for herself, from dissociation to engagement, from manic mood swings to calm stability.
In the book’s acknowledgments, after a long list of thank-yous, Carriére writes “Thank you to my mother and father. Thank you for everything you did right and everything you did wrong.” In these simple sentences lies a fitting tribute to compassion and forgiveness.
Erica Goss is the author of Night Court, winner of the 2017 Lyrebird Award from Glass Lyre Press. Recent and upcoming publications include The Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Oregon Humanities, Creative Nonfiction, North Dakota Quarterly, Gargoyle, Spillway, A-Minor, Redactions, Consequence, The Sunlight Press, The Pedestal, San Pedro River Review, and Critical Read. Erica served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California, from 2013-2016. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she teaches, writes and edits the newsletter Sticks & Stones.
