A well-written, unnervingly straightforward midlife memoir about growing up the daughter of a noted American artist and a famous German actor. Carriere's childhood seems to have lacked boundaries of any kind: there were few secrets kept between parent and child, no rules as such, and no closed doors in her house. Even the psychiatric institute that the author spends time in seems more like a summer camp than a medical facility. Her mother loved art and solitude; her father worked often before deciding to leave the marriage and remarry. Both had scads of money, but and while she had a few adults in her life who tried to look out for her, including a full-time governess, she largely fell through the cracks. The emotional turbulence she faced as a teen might be said to have been as severe as it was predictable.

This book isn't for the faint of heart. Carriere hides little from the readers: if you don't want to read about self-injury or drug use, you shouldn't touch this one. But the author recognizes that these are coping mechanisms, not the beating heart of her book. Having been raised with almost no personal boundaries, the author's main endeavor here is to establish the boundaries of her own self, which she claims to have done largely through the composition of this memoir. Admittedly, that isn't exactly groundbreaking, but fans of the memoir genre will find reasons here to read through to the end. From a more literary perspective, the author's literary voice is meticulously polished: her clean, fluid sentences effectively balance their heavy emotional content. But the author's real accomplishment in "Everything / Nothing / Someone" is finding a way to describe depersonalization, a seemingly impossible task that she handles downright elegantly. These descriptions of her periodic bouts of psychic self-annihilation are at once astonishingly effective and absolutely terrifying. The author leaves no doubt that she suffered to provide her reader with a firsthand account of a mental phenomenon that, in literature, is largely dealt with in purely allegorical terms. Carriere, who's from a thoroughly artistic background, is a real writer, but this one is not for everyone. Recommended to fans of this genre and those interested in topics related to mental illness. ( )

I’d basically had it with this book when the memoirist’s father, German actor Mathieu Carrière, talked about his dream of making a film in which he and his teenage daughter Alice would star as lovers. There would, of course, be a sex scene. Could it become more sordid than that? Well, yes, perhaps it could. The “banality of evil” is the phrase that came to mind once I’d reached that point. I had struggled to find a sympathetic human in the text and realized it wasn’t gonna happen. (Okay, maybe the nanny, but her time on stage was brief.) Alas, there’s just too, too much of Alice and her dysfunction.

Also, contrary to the comments of many, I don’t think the writing is anything special at all. The author is perhaps less interesting than she thinks she is. There’s something flat about the whole endeavour. I question the book’s being published. To what end? Sensationalism? By turns dreary and debauched, this memoir could not and in fact did not end soon enough for me. I simply stopped at the one-third point. Two hundred more pages seemed like unnecessary torture. Cannot recommend. ( )

"Too Much Anger, Too Many Tears" meets "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" in this memoir of growing up with serious mental illness, much of it induced by reactions to medications prescribed for what started out as a mild emotional sort of depression. Alice might not have been sicker than most teenagers if se hadn't so willingly swallowed all those pills. As things are, while on drugs (mostly but not all legal medication), she exaggerates her father's relatively minor mistakes to the point where he has to leave the coimtru kist because she'd rather live with her mother, tries street drugs, sleeps around, and eventually decides to be a responsible adult--seeking her father's forgiveness, nursing her mother through the mother's final illness. With all the damage drugs have done her, Alice doesn't achieve healthiness or responsibility overnight, but her life-affirming story is already being recognized as important enough for schools to put on student reading lists.

Parents might object to their children's reading this book in high schol. It's raw, often disgusting, disturbing, scary. We meet intestinal parasites and watch surgical wounds failing to heal. I''d recommend this book for ages 18+ but would not try to use it in high school. I'd let its not being recommended to them motivate high school students to discover it on their own. ( )

Growing up with divorced parents is hard enough, but memoirist Alice Carriere had it tougher than many. Ignored by her aloof artist mother and treated inappropriately by her lecherous actor father, young Alice sought shelter in audiobooks and the love of her governess, Nanny. These supports, however, did not prevent her from developing a raging case of dissociative disorder. While her peers were attending college, Alice spent time in elite psychiatric hospitals and dealing with doctors who prescribed multiple drugs and told her that she could never live without them. Her therapist encouraged Alice to see herself as a victim of molestation. Despite everything she goes through, Alice nonetheless grows up to discover forgiveness, healing and love.

This memoir is impressively written; Alice certainly knows her way around a metaphor. She is not afraid to present herself as she really is, even at the height of a manic, paranoid, or dissociative episode, or her parents as they really are. Highly recommended.

I received an electronic pre-publication copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I was not compensated in any way. ( )