All Reviews

We meet Sarah LaBrie in 2017, when her grandmother calls to tell her that LaBrie’s mother is experiencing delusions and paranoia. Brie is living in Los Angeles, writing commissioned opera libretti that explore generational and racial trauma on a broad scale. Since she eagerly left her childhood home in Houston, Texas, her education and career as a TV writer and librettist have carried her from coast to coast. Now, LaBrie’s focus must shift from her career in California to her mom’s well-being back in Houston. In her poignant debut memoir, No One Gets to Fall Apart, LaBrie faces her own generational trauma, and her work gets personal. 

LaBrie has often been the subject of her mother’s ire, finding herself banished to a closet as a child and subjected to incessant questioning as an adult. Her family has a history of men leaving, and women and children fending for themselves. As a result, her female relatives have developed a pattern of disassociating or isolating themselves when faced with difficult situations. As LaBrie enters her 30s and life with a partner, she fears that marriage and motherhood will be opportunities to repeat her family history.

As she tries to untangle how her mother’s deteriorating mental illness—she is eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia—and her own environment, family history and socioeconomic status have shaped her, LaBrie also writes of her equally tangled unpublished novel. “I’ve become so fixated on not allowing myself to go crazy, I’ve lost touch with the feelings that the story needs to work,” she writes. Her agent suggests, instead, that LaBrie try writing about her mother. But she resists: “Her illness is unfolding according to no rules at all, and no matter how I try to hold it together, the structure falls to pieces.”

She leans into that feeling in the memoir, which ranges widely, leaping across locations and ideas, and threatens to come apart just as the author’s life seems ready to detonate. But thanks to LaBrie’s remarkable intellect and frankness, these multifaceted streams of thought coalesce. Ambitious in scope, No One Gets to Fall Apart examines family dynamics, mental health, Blackness, literature, friendship, the #MeToo movement and more as LaBrie illustrates her desire to embrace her own emotions, even as the temptation to suppress them looms.

With incandescent prose and vibrant imagery, André Aciman evokes the rich, kaleidoscopic and sensual experiences of his coming-of-age in his memoir, Roman Year.

Just before the Six Years War broke out between Israel and Egypt, 16-year-old Aciman fled Egypt with his deaf mother and younger brother. Packing all their belongings in 31 suitcases, the once prosperous family moved from an Egyptian mansion to a former brothel on an ill-lit, noisy Roman street. During their first afternoon in that shabby apartment in a strange place, “waves of gloom” wash over the family, and the young Aciman feels a “persistent, undefinable numbness that eventually overtakes you and won’t let go.” Aciman doesn’t like the street, Via Clelia, nor does he like Rome: “I belonged elsewhere, but I didn’t know where.” 

While his brother and his mother adapt to their new lives, Aciman buries himself in books and spends much of his year reading: Proust, Woolf and Joyce are among the authors who enchant him. Eventually, as he and his brother explore Rome, Aciman’s affection for the city starts to develop. After he spends Christmas break in Paris, wandering the streets of the City of Light, whiling away time in cafes, visiting Shakespeare and Company and doing research for a study of literary existentialists, Aciman feels as if he might have found his elsewhere. He reluctantly returns to Rome, where he is surprised to find that his love for the Eternal City blossoms, in part because of his intimacy with several women and his connection to the texts that he reads.  

The Call Me By Your Name author glories in the little moments when “there were colors everywhere, everything and everyone was beautiful.” At the end of the year, as he and his family prepare to move to New York City, he finds that “Rome never asked to be loved . . . and I wouldn’t know that I loved it or wanted to love it until I was about to lose it.” Roman Year is a gem of a memoir that sparkles with light that reflects off every facet of Aciman’s pivotal year.

It all began with a T-shirt. On her 32nd birthday, Glory Edim was surprised by a gift from her ex-partner, a custom-made T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Well-Read Black Girl.” When she wore it on the streets of Brooklyn, she was again surprised: People stopped her to talk about books.

Thus began an evolving conversation, first with her fledgling book club, Well-Read Black Girl, which soon attracted acclaimed authors like Tayari Jones (An American Marriage) and Angela Flournoy (The Turner House); then with her premiere virtual literary festival, attended by more than 800 people. Her podcast, Well-Read With Glory Edim, followed. Now, in her plucky, intimate memoir, Gather Me: A Memoir in Praise of the Books That Saved Me, Edim offers her own story, tethering the books and authors she has found and loved to her own rocky journey of self-discovery. It’s reader catnip. 

Edim begins each chapter with a list of the authors and books that most influenced her as she came of age, from childhood (My Book of Bible Stories, The Berenstain Bears) through experiencing romantic love for the first time (Romeo and Juliet, Beloved) to her fraught relationship with her aging mother (Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River). She finds solace, wisdom, grace, humor and, especially, support in these tomes as she navigates hard times, and her own writing grows more poignant. 

Yet Gather Me is more than an ode to writers spun from a respectful distance: This is a hands-on guidebook to getting by in good (literary) company. Through reading, Edim found stable ground within her fracturing Nigerian immigrant family, and later as a single mom. Writers like Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Sonia Sanchez, bell hooks, James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston became her community. 

The title borrows a quote from Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. . . . It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.” Edim writes, “I am never alone. The T-shirt, the books, the authors, the club, the community: Those things are now my bright and roaring fire, my blessed and beautiful universe.” Gather Me is a powerful invitation to join her there.