Book Club: NO ONE GETS TO FALL APART with Sarah LaBrie

Our May 2025 Book Club Selection

May 03, 2025

Earlier this year, when I was sketching out our Bottom Reader Book Club author line-up for the year, I reached out to one of my most trusted source of book recommendations: John Caleb Grenn. Via Instagram (find him @jcgrenn_reads), John Caleb posts gorgeous stacks of literary fiction, eye-catching book doodles, and helpful book reviews—with a dash of humor and humility. He also designed last year’s Mississippi Book Festival official poster. I wanted to know: What Southern-rooted book would JC suggest for a Rooted book club conversation (that he would also help facilitate)? After some deliberation, he suggested Sarah LaBrie’s No One Gets to Fall Apart, a memoir that he had already read and loved. “But does Texas count as part of the South?” he asked.

Because this is our book club, and we get to make our own rules, the answer was a resounding YES.

No One Gets to Fall Apart was a 2024 New York Times "Editor's Pick" and "Notable Book of the Year," an Essence "Most Anticipated," a Lit Hub's "Most Anticipated," an Oprah Daily "Best Book of Fall," and an Esquire "Best Memoir of the Year." It has been compared to Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive (one of my favorite books of all time) and Tara Westover’s Educated. Chronicling her mother’s struggles with mental illness, LaBrie also examines the through line of mental illness in her family history and the ripple of effects of generational trauma. This story is not an easy one, but it’s an important one.

So, I’m thrilled to get to talk with Sarah LaBrie about her unforgettable debut book No One Gets to Fall Apart alongside my very insightful friend JC Grenn on Thursday May 29 at 7 p.m. CT. I do hope you can join us!

In this poignant memoir, as candid and indelible as The Glass Castle and Memorial Drive, a writer takes on the conflict between the love that binds us to home and the desire to escape it for good. 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.

Order NO ONE GETS TO FALL APART

Sarah LaBrie is an author and TV writer based in Los Angeles. Her work appears in The Guardian, Guernica, Joyland, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, and other publications. Her libretti have been performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Apollo Theater, and she has written on television series including Minx, Blindspotting, Made for Love, and Love, Victor. LaBrie has received fellowships from MacDowell, the Ucross Foundation, Yaddo, Sewanee, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and was nominated for Best Television Comedy Script at the 2024 Women’s Image Network Awards for her work on Blindspotting. She earned her BA from Brown University in Comparative Literature and Literary Arts and an MFA from New York University as a Writers in the Schools Fellow.