Tumbling Through the Mother-Daughter Multiverse (with Sarah Labrie)

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Introduction - 0:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: This episode includes brief discussion of suicide around the one-hour mark. Listener discretion is advised. If you're struggling, please reach out to someone you trust. You can also call or text the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. The number is 988.

BLAIR HODGES: Welcome to Relationscapes, the podcast where we explore the terrain of human connection and identity, breaking down borders as we go. I'm journalist Blair Hodges in Salt Lake City, and our guide in this episode exploring mother/daughter relationships is author Sarah Labrie.

CLIP FROM SARAH LABRIE INTERVIEW: When she wasn't treating me terribly, she treated me like a god. She treated me like I was the most beautiful, most important, most talented, most creative, most perfect creation to ever exist, and I was so beautiful. And she just ingrained that into me from basically when I was born.

And then, yes, the flip side of that was that when she was mad, I was nothing. I was garbage. I was the dirt on the bottom of her shoe.

BLAIR HODGES: In a parallel universe somewhere out there, Sarah Labrie stayed in Houston with her emotionally volatile mother, where schizophrenia eventually overtook both of their lives. But in this universe—the one we live in—Sarah developed an exit strategy.

She became a chronic overachiever. She made her way to the Ivy Leagues, found a supportive partner, and began writing her debut novel about choices and parallel worlds.

But beneath her rising success, quiet fears began to grow: her mother's illness wasn't something she'd escaped, but something she might inherit—something that could undo everything she'd started to build.

Sarah Labrie tells the story in her acclaimed memoir, No One Gets to Fall Apart. And she's here to talk about it right now.

 

Where’s the Memoir Disclaimer – 02:11

 

BLAIR HODGES: Sarah Labrie, welcome to Relationscapes.

SARAH LABRIE: Thank you. I'm so glad to be here.

BLAIR HODGES: I noticed at the beginning of your book—it's a memoir—but it doesn't have the customary disclaimer every memoir always has, where it's like, "This is my memory to the best of my ability, and memory is very strange, and don't sue me!" [laughter] You didn't have that. What's going on?

SARAH LABRIE: That's so funny. I actually wrote one of those, and I spent a lot of time on it, and I was very proud of it. And then the publisher—I think when we did the legal read—was like, we have to put this on the copyright page, and it needs to be four sentences. So if you go to the copyright page, it's at the top.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I didn't notice it. I don't usually read the copyright page.

SARAH LABRIE: Well, why would you? Why would anyone?

BLAIR HODGES: Now I want to read this!

“This is a work of nonfiction. The events and experiences detailed herein are all true and have been faithfully rendered as I have remembered them to the best of my ability. Some names, identities, and circumstances have been changed in order to protect the integrity and/or privacy of the various individuals involved.”

So yeah, that's—oh, wait, there's more.

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: “Though conversations come from my keen recollection of them, they are not written to represent word-for-word documentation. Rather, I've retold them in a way that evokes the real feeling and meaning of what was said, in keeping with the true essence of the mood and spirit of the event.”

Okay, so the first paragraph of that seems like what the lawyers wanted, and the second one seems more your reflections on that?

SARAH LABRIE: I think the lawyer took what I wrote and rewrote it and was like, this is it. Sorry. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Some people do a full-on essay at the outset, a reflection on memory.

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah, I tried to do that. I wanted to!

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, well, now I know. I'm glad to know it's there so people who get the book can check it out. [laughs]

But let's start when you were young. There's a really early memory you relate in the book. I actually thought it would be great to have you read this part. This is on page 18. It's one of your earliest memories.

SARAH LABRIE: Okay. Yeah. I love starting an interview with reading because I think reading from the book can tell you so much more about it than talking about the book.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

SARAH LABRIE: Okay, great.

 

EXCERPT: Painting the Night – 04:14

 

SARAH LABRIE: In the story of my mother and me, a first image would be the Toyota Celica she drove when I was small, pulling into our driveway, her finger pointing at the immense flock of blackbirds perched on the power lines above us. I am five. She is 25, unassumingly small, often harried. She smiles rarely, but when she does, she's extremely pretty.

If you're bad, she tells me, the birds will know. They'll give you a paintbrush, and you'll have to paint the sky black at night. You'll paint and paint. You'll never get the chance to sleep.

But why won't I sleep? I ask her, delighted, knowing the answer.

Because as soon as you're done, they'll make you wash the paint off. So it's day again, and you'll have to start over.

And what if I won't? I ask. What if I say no?

Then they'll come in through the window at night and smother you.

I imagine feathers against my skin, the sound of rustling black wings.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, this is incredibly creative and also horrifying. What is this?

SARAH LABRIE: I think this is what happens when a mentally ill 20-year-old gets pregnant, decides to have the child, and does everything she can to raise it without compromising her values. My mom was fiercely independent, and she had a really specific idea of how to raise me. And she also loved horror. She loved horror movies.

You know, I started reading Stephen King when I was—I think those were the first big books I ever read. I was maybe 11 years old. I remember a sleepover, my 11th or 12th birthday. I sent her out to get a movie, and she brought back The Evil Dead, the original Evil Dead, for a bunch of 11-year-old girls who wanted—

BLAIR HODGES: Girls love this movie, right?

SARAH LABRIE: —we wanted like Father of the Bride or Mrs. Doubtfire, you know? And that was just—we would stay up really late and watch Tales from the Crypt from when I was way too young. But it's one of those things where you don't know that's not normal for other kids.

And she made up these stories with these characters who had these horrible punishments. And she would tell them to me every night.

BLAIR HODGES: This one is so genius. It is a genius little story. This idea of making you paint the sky black and then you wash it off. It's sort of this story that explains how day and night works. It's horrifying.

SARAH LABRIE: Exactly.

 

Broken Bedroom Window – 06:33

 

BLAIR HODGES: So genius. I loved it. So I see where you get some of your creativity. I'm already seeing something from your mother in you. And this earliest memory from you is a memory of creation, really. And you've gone on to become a creator. And as you mentioned, she got pregnant young.

You all lived in a fourplex in the Third Ward in Houston that your grandmother owned. Tell me more about your relationship with your mom growing up.

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah, no, I love that you're bringing this up because I think—because the book is about her schizophrenia and the way our relationship when I was younger was really hard—changed me, that sometimes I'm doing her a disservice by not showing or talking enough about the ways she shaped me and encouraged me and is the reason I am a writer. Because part of the personality disorder I think she had when I was younger was that when she wasn't treating me terribly, she treated me like a god.

She treated me like I was the most beautiful, most important, most talented, most creative, most perfect creation to ever exist. If anybody was ever mean to me, it was because they were jealous of me. And I was so beautiful. And she just ingrained that into me from basically when I was born.

And then, yes, the flip side of that was that when she was mad, I was nothing. I was garbage. I was the dirt on the bottom of her shoe.

BLAIR HODGES: I mean, it could get horrifying. Talk about the dog incident, for example. This is when you had these dogs and you broke a window.

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah. So when I was a little bit older, maybe 11, I think things got really difficult between us. When I was in middle school, we were fighting a lot. And I had these three dogs that had kind of come into my possession in various strange ways, which were very Texas at the time.

I think in Houston, especially Black people, you would just kind of find a dog. But then also we bought dogs from breeders. It was a weird world that I am actually now, as an adult, doing a lot to change. I do a lot of fostering and dog activism. But anyway, I had these two purebred schnauzers—AKC papers, all of it—and this mutt that was found on the side of the road that a friend had given us because we had a backyard.

And I loved these dogs. But my mother was not capable of taking care of them in the same way she wasn't capable of taking care of me. And she had this terrible, terrible temper. And one day the dogs were out of food, and she was leaving to go somewhere at night, and I asked her to pick up some food for the dogs. And she got really mad at me.

She would always get really mad about money issues, even though we didn't really have severe money problems. It was just a trigger for her.

BLAIR HODGES: Had she become a nurse by then already, or she became a nurse?

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah. She had dropped out of college, gone to nursing school, had become a nurse, was working, you know, and had grown up pretty financially secure because my grandmother was an entrepreneur. But this was a trigger for her.

And she screamed at me and was mad at me for always asking for things. And then she left. And I was so upset that after she left, I threw something at my bedroom window and I broke the window. And I knew immediately that I had crossed a line, that the punishment for this was going to be really, really bad.

And we were already kind of in an era where she was hitting me a lot with belts, and she was constantly ranting at me and yelling at me. And I was really scared.

So I wrote her a letter apologizing and telling her what I had done so she wouldn't find out, as if I had tried to keep it a secret. And I left the letter at the bottom of the stairs so she would see it right when she got home.

And when she got home, she read the letter, and she came upstairs and she told me to get in the car. And she put the dogs in the car. And she drove to a Petco off the side of the highway and just dropped the dogs off in the parking lot.

And I didn't know she was going to do that. I didn't know what was happening. And I was just so scared. It was the middle of the night. And I just remember seeing the dogs running after our car. She got back up on the highway, and I was a child. I was just paralyzed with fear.

And then we got home, and she bent me over the bathtub and she spanked me with a belt. And she made me sleep in my bedroom with the broken window because she knew I was terrified of bugs. We lived in a part of Houston where there were just constant June bugs everywhere. And they would fly in and out.

And I just remember being so scared that night. And it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. And it wasn't something I talked about. I didn't tell anyone about it.

BLAIR HODGES: Do you feel, out of embarrassment maybe—or why would a kid—maybe it's hard to remember, right? Because it's been so long.

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah, I think—I mean, I remember it happening. I think I remember it happening photographically. But there is that thing where, you know, every time you remember something, it's a memory of a memory, so who knows?

But I think when you're that young, you don't know other people's lives aren't like that. I never thought, oh, if I tell somebody about this, people will help me. Because I thought, well, maybe everyone's mom is crazy.

I had my grandmother and my aunt, who loved me so much and who I loved so much. And they knew this had happened. And nobody was acting like it was a big deal. And I think that's because of their own traumas they had gone through. Maybe to them, it didn't seem that extreme. But obviously, in retrospect, it was.

And the reason I talk about it now is because I do think it is kind of a sign of a personality-disordered view of a parent who is abusing your pets or putting them in very unsafe situations or hurting you through your pets. That probably is a sign you're in danger. And I want people to know that.

 

Achieve Your Way Out – 12:19

 

BLAIR HODGES: And as a kid, of course, you couldn't know that. But this incident loomed so large for you.

The relationship with your mom through your youth wasn't going to get repaired by the time you were in the eighth grade. You talk about how you're ready to get out of there. So you were already making plans.

You're emailing colleges, you're applying for grants and scholarships and starting to play the flute and doing your—it seemed like your plan early was to get out.

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember sitting in my bathtub shortly after that happened and being like, okay, I'm going to apply to Harvard. I'm going to apply to Princeton. I'm just going to go as far away as I can.

And I didn't end up applying to Harvard because I didn't think I would get in, which was stupid. But you know—

BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] I didn't get in, so—

SARAH LABRIE: But I did the thing where I knew the exact right SAT test prep place to go. I knew it wasn't Princeton Review. I knew it was the one the kids whose parents weren't from the United States went to, the one that was kind of outside of the city. It was called TestMasters. That was the one you go to. They know the one.

I asked my friends, and I made sure I went to the right test prep place. I made sure I would get all of the accolades you need on your SATs to get into the top five colleges. I was not leaving anything up to chance, starting from when I was about 12 years old.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

SARAH LABRIE: And I think my way out of this was just achievement, achievement, achievement. 

BLAIR HODGES: You were aiming really high. You ended up at Brown, right?

SARAH LABRIE: Mhmm.

BLAIR HODGES: So this is a prestigious school. But when you get there, it seems like people might expect the story to go, okay, you finally escaped, and now you can really spread your wings and fly. You're a high achiever. But things at Brown aren't going so well for you, it seemed.

SARAH LABRIE: I think one of the things is that I had gone to this very fancy prep school in Houston, and that was just by chance. My grandmother kind of had her ear to the ground about stuff like that. There had been some violence in the Houston Independent School District, and she was afraid of sending me to the local school I was districted to.

And she just kind of knew how to get me on the waitlist for St. John's, which is this very fancy private school. It's where Rushmore, the Wes Anderson film, was filmed and what it's about. Elizabeth Holmes went there. It's kind of like an East Coast boarding school in Houston.

BLAIR HODGES: And look how far Elizabeth went. I mean, the possibilities are endless. You, too, could start a fake blood-testing company. [laughter]

SARAH LABRIE: Exactly! But I know how she did it. Those environments, those hothouse environments—I know why she did it, and I know how she did it. I just understand her. Because at that school, even though it was a wonderful school and I felt very at home there, there was a part of the aggressive, achievement-focused culture where it could kind of turn you into a sociopath.

It would be very easy for someone to come out of that like Elizabeth Holmes. I understand it because you're just like, "success above all else." Because I was the same way. I am the same way. And I haven't hurt other people with that attitude, but I've certainly hurt myself.

BLAIR HODGES: You met a friend there, Sadie, who you talk about in the book, who becomes a very close friend of yours and someone you kind of go back and forth with throughout the book. But your friend groups are changing, too. You say you shifted into a different circle of friends made up of white kids from high cost-of-living cities.

So your relationship with Sadie, who's also Black—there are of tensions around race at Brown?

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah, absolutely. I don't know how to explain this. I had come from a school I'd been at from first through twelfth grade. I knew everyone. My teachers knew me. I knew every inch of the campus. And then suddenly I'm in Rhode Island. Boys are thinking I'm pretty. I'm seeing snow for the first time.

BLAIR HODGES: Literally. The first time in person literally?

SARAH LABRIE: Absolutely. The first time I'd ever seen snow. The first time I'd ever been that cold. I had never been that cold. I didn't have the right shoes. I didn't have the right coat. And I was so depressed. But I didn't know how much of that—weather was definitely a contributing factor—but it was also just that I was so far away from home. The only home I'd known for my whole life.

BLAIR HODGES: And were you in touch with your mom much at this time?

SARAH LABRIE: Every time I would try to call her and be like, something is wrong. I am very much not okay. She would just scream and scream and scream. She could not handle that. She would just say, I worked too hard. Your grandma worked too hard. It was not about my emotions at all with her, ever. It was only about how she felt. Ever.

So I had no one to turn to except for this friend, Sadie, who really did absolutely swoop in and save my life, without a doubt.

BLAIR HODGES: What did she do to make such a difference for you?

SARAH LABRIE: She just cared. She listened to me. I think I had been—

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, yeah, you told her about your mom. This is one of maybe the first people you'd really said, hey, I maybe was abused in my youth.

SARAH LABRIE: Absolutely. And she was the first person to say, none of this is okay. None of what happened to you is okay.

And more than that, I remember one time she just showed up at my dorm and she'd burned me a bunch of CDs because she thought my music taste was stupid. And she was helping me.

BLAIR HODGES: What were you listening to?

SARAH LABRIE: I mean, I listened to Death Cab for Cutie and Counting Crows.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh wow.

SARAH LABRIE: Right, I know, I know.

BLAIR HODGES: Do you still, hopefully?

SARAH LABRIE: Of course, yeah. Counting Crows was my wedding song. My husband and I still—

BLAIR HODGES: This Desert Life is one of my favorite albums.

SARAH LABRIE: Right. Yeah, exactly.

BLAIR HODGES: So she got you some new—what did she want you to listen to?

SARAH LABRIE: Blonde Redhead and I think The xx and TV on the Radio.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay.

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah, just kind of cooler indie bands that were not as well known. This was early-to-mid 2000s. So that—

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, yeah.

SARAH LABRIE: She was cool. She's cool.

BLAIR HODGES: She got you as a friend. She talked to you about your mom, and she validated and maybe even told you some things you needed to hear about the fact that it was abusive.

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah, yeah. And just that the way I felt wasn't crazy. She was the first person to not just dismiss out of hand that there were reasons why I was so depressed and why I was the way I was.

Because at that point, by my senior year, I felt like I wanted to kill myself. I wanted to die. And I did.

BLAIR HODGES: Were you actively suicidal?

SARAH LABRIE: I was engaging in self-harm. And it was sort of like, you know, maybe I could get some sleep, some Tylenol PM. I didn't know how anyone did that, you know. But I knew that I wanted to be dead. I didn't want to be alive anymore.

 

A New Way to Be Angry – 19:01

 

BLAIR HODGES: You also were dealing with health issues and with eating disorders as well, right? In spite of all this, you do manage to graduate. You graduate from Brown, and you move to LA. And this is where you kind of first get connected with the entertainment industry, right?

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah. Yeah. So I graduated by the skin of my teeth. I don't even know how. And I had tried to drop out. I went home spring break my senior year and said I wasn't going back. And my grandmother actually was the one who was like, if you don't go back, you'll ruin your life.

And she was right. She was right. And I'm so glad I finished.

BLAIR HODGES: Do you think if she didn't say that, you would have stayed? Because sometimes the advice to parents is you just need to validate. But it sounds like she straight up was like, you will ruin your life.

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah. No, if she didn't say that, I would have stayed at home. I would not have finished college. And that would have been the worst decision I ever made.

BLAIR HODGES: And you did it, so good job. Is Grandma still around?

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah. Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, terrific. Okay, great. So she got you back. You went back to school. You finished. Now you're in LA and you're trying to figure out what to do.

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah. So I'd had a boyfriend on and off in college who lived in Beverly Hills, and so I felt pretty familiar with LA. And I finagled a job as an assistant at an entertainment agency. Those are really high-pressure jobs, really hard. They're really great because they connect you with this network of Hollywood people.

But I was not in any way psychologically prepared for that job at all.

BLAIR HODGES: So while you're out there in LA, you sign up to take some fiction classes at UCLA Extension. You join a writing group, and you go on a date with this filmmaker named Ethan, who you had met at a birthday party for a friend. And Ethan's going to play a big role here. In fact, you're still with Ethan.

And I want to read this quote from the book about Ethan. It says, “I used to think everyone screamed terrible things when they got angry, never apologized, and then went on as if nothing happened at all. And I'm learning from Ethan this isn't true.” Tell me more about that.

SARAH LABRIE: I am so lucky that I met this person. I knew from basically the first date. I remember one of my best friends, the person whose birthday party I met him at, she was like, don't think this person can save you. But I was like, he can save me. And he did. And I think that's okay.

I think something I've had to learn is that if you have had a really difficult time and someone reaches out a hand and is like, I love you and I want to help you, it's okay to take that.

He came from a family of psychologists. And it had worked out really well for him in that he understood what it meant to be loved properly, and he knew how to care for another person. And he is still probably the most selfless person I know.

BLAIR HODGES: What was it like seeing his relationship with his mom? Now you have kind of a more direct comparison. Because I don't think you were ever around Sadie's mom, for example. Maybe you had conversations with friends, but you actually came to know Ethan's mom. What was that like?

SARAH LABRIE: I remember the first time I went home to visit his family. And I'll say, it was really hard for me to be in a functional relationship because I did not have an example of that. I had never been in one before.

I was somebody who had done horrible things in the past in relationships just to sabotage them. Even with really kind people. And he wouldn't let me do that. He was kind of a good match for me.

And I remember being like, okay, I'm going to hold on. I'm not going to blow this up because I want to go to his sister's wedding. That's going to be, I think, maybe eight months out from when we went on our first date. And I was like, we're going to make it to the wedding.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, weddings. That's a big moment if you're dating somebody, to go to a wedding.

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah. I was like, if I can hold on, if I can not mess this up till then. And so we went home for his sister's wedding. I remember meeting his mom and being terrified because I was always terrified of all my friends’ parents, since I was terrified of my mom. I just expected, I don't know, yelling and screaming and fighting.

And she was just the most normal, kindest, most grounded person. And she still is. She calls me just to chat. We hang. I love hanging out with her. She's a normal mom—a really good, normal mom. And I feel so lucky every day that I get to be part of that family.

BLAIR HODGES: In spite of all your praise for her and for Ethan, you also don't shy away from writing things that I think, if I were Ethan, I might feel ashamed of, or might feel like, "oh, I wish that wasn't in the book."

I'll give you an example. You were a grad student at NYU, so you end up going back to school, and you're there experiencing really deep depression. And sometimes he's really blunt with you about it in ways that I kind of cringe at. Here's a quote. You say, “The problem with depression is that, like alcoholism, it's an illness people get annoyed at you for having.”

So what about talking about that aspect of your relationship with Ethan?

SARAH LABRIE: It was really important for me to present all the sides of our relationship in this book. We are not unflawed as a couple. He's not an unflawed human being. And I wanted it to be clear that a relationship doesn't have to be perfect to be helpful or nurturing or healthy for you.

I remember when I wrote this book, keeping in all of those moments, like the one you just mentioned, where he is really blunt with me. I think when I first tell him about my mom's diagnosis with schizophrenia, he's kind of like, well, you know, she's never been that good of a mom. Basically, like, get off the floor.

BLAIR HODGES: That's where I was like, oh, my gosh. Like, wait, hold on, bud.

SARAH LABRIE: And I remember being a little bit shocked by that. But I wanted to keep it all in because I needed it to be there. I needed this book to be an honest chronicle of that year.

I do remember leaving the manuscript out during the copyediting phase. I hadn't told him any of this. He hadn't read it. And I left it on the coffee table, and I went—I don't know—I was walking the dogs or something. I came back and he was reading it. And I was like, oh no, I didn't even get to prepare you.

I wanted to be respectful. I thought, if somebody wants me to take something out, I should at least discuss it with them. But he didn't say that. If anything, he deepened his character and really made sure all of those moments rang true. He basically did another copyediting pass on it with me and used his filmmaker skills and storytelling skills to make sure those moments really popped.

I think he has not only a humility around himself as a person, but also such a deep love of storytelling.

BLAIR HODGES: And he's a filmmaker too, right? So he's probably like, hey, I see you maybe pulling punches over here. But you know what? This is—not only is it true, but it actually amplifies the story.

SARAH LABRIE: Exactly. Exactly. Because for both of us, our highest god is good art—making the art good, putting the effort in. And he knows that about me. So he was like, I want you to reach the standard I know you've set for yourself with this book. And I'll sacrifice myself for that. I don't care. It wasn't even a question for him.

 

No One Gets to Fall Apart – 25:51

 

BLAIR HODGES: Well, we'll talk a little bit more about him as we go. We're talking with Sarah Labrie about the book No One Gets to Fall Apart. In fact, the title came from kind of his attitude, right? This idea of, like, hey, Sarah, nobody gets to fall apart. Is my memory correct on that?

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah, yeah. It was originally called The Anatomy Book, after the novel.

BLAIR HODGES: The novel you were working on.

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah, the kind of failed novel this book grew out of. And then it was called Everything You Love Will Disappear, which is something my mom said to me when I was 14 and that I always remembered.

But then my friend Carmel Banaski, who's also a writer, was like, "you can't call a book that. It sounds like you're cursing the reader. Nobody's going to pick that up in a bookstore and take it to their family." And I was like, "you're right."

BLAIR HODGES: You could have turned it into a question. Will everything you love disappear? And then I’ve got to find out, right? [laughs]

SARAH LABRIE: Like one of those old BuzzFeed headlines, where it was clickbait. I could have made it Will Everything We Love on This Earth Disappear Forever? Yeah, probably eventually. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: But yeah, he was basically helping you pull yourself together, kind of a thing, right?

SARAH LABRIE: Exactly. And that's kind of his role, I think, throughout our lives. It's funny because he's very dramatic over little things. Like if I—there are towels hanging on that rack behind me, and if I pull them down and put them in the wrong place, he'll be like, why are the towels in the wrong place?

But if it's big existential issues, I'm the one who's spiraling. I'm the one who's like, I'll never make it. Writing is so hard. And he's like, get off the ground. Because even if you do give up, time keeps passing, and eventually you have to just get off the ground. You have to stand back up. You have no other option.

 

Nightmares During the Day – 27:34

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, well, I mean—and if we're mentally healthy enough, right? Because for some people—this is what I want to talk about next—is your mom. So let's go to 2017. You get a phone call from your grandmother, and she says your mom was found on the side of a freeway in Houston in her car. She was honking. Her car was full of notes she had taken about how she's being stalked and all these details she was writing. Tell me about how you—I guess, was this call a surprise to you, or had you seen signs leading up to this?

SARAH LABRIE: I had not spoken to her in a few years when that happened. We were not on speaking terms, and I was in the middle of this novel, The Anatomy Book, trying to pull it together. I had devoted the last five years of my life to this book, and it just wasn't happening. It wasn't working. And all I wanted to do was be a successful fiction writer. That was all I wanted. And I was failing at that.

And then I got this call and was suddenly just shocked out of my entire life trajectory. Everything changed. And in retrospect, of course, there were signs. She was obviously damaged, mentally ill. When I was younger, there was clearly something wrong that we were just ignoring and ignoring and ignoring. And now we couldn't ignore it anymore. It all just erupted.

And suddenly the question for me became: Do I go back home? Do I need to take care of her? Is this too much for my family to handle without me? Do I live with the guilt of staying in Hollywood and trying to make writing work now that it was finally—kind of—the TV and libretto stuff was very gradually starting to get some momentum, even if the novel wasn't working? Do I stay here and try to see what happens there? Do I keep trying to be a novelist?

All of a sudden, all of these questions just came to a head in that moment of her psychotic break.

BLAIR HODGES: And schizophrenia in the book here is defined as the difficulty patients have when it comes to resolving threads of incoming sensory perception. That's kind of a technical definition. How do you make sense of it through your mom's experience and your connection to that?

SARAH LABRIE: It's something I have read about a lot and thought about a lot. It seems like it's a collection of symptoms that could be diagnosed in a lot of different ways, depending on the context. There might not even be such a thing as schizophrenia. Some psychiatrists don't even believe in it.

For me, watching my mom, it feels like she's having nightmares during the day. And in the same way that when you're having a nightmare, you don't know it's not real, that's happening to her in her waking life. That's the closest I can come to explaining it.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Give us some examples of the kind of episodes. I know, for example, it involved Lance Blanks, former NBA player.

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah. So he became a commentator and a coach, and he was friends with my mom when they were in high school in Houston. They were very close. He had a big crush on her. He was a year or two younger than her, and they stayed in touch as she got older.

And then, I think around one time they'd had dinner, and she had her psychotic break shortly after that. For some reason, he became the object of her delusions. She thought he was watching her in an airplane from the sky. And her logic behind that was that she knew he had more money than most of the people she knew, so she decided he must be the person watching her.

That feels like dream logic to me, where something weird's happening in a dream and you have a thought—

BLAIR HODGES: —it makes sense in the dream.

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah, right.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

SARAH LABRIE: And she latched onto it, and then it became this whole big—she thought it was the morphing thing of, well, he's watching me from the sky, and then I'm on a contest like The Bachelorette. It was like a Truman Show delusion where she thought people were watching her. She thought she was on a reality show and that she was being pursued by suitors. Lance Blanks was one of them. And Hakeem Olajuwon was one of them.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, like Houston's best player. Did she like the NBA? Was she a Rockets fan?

SARAH LABRIE: Yes, we were all Rockets fans because we were—

BLAIR HODGES: Booo! Let me just say here, from Salt Lake City, boooo! You guys won the title that was supposed to be ours. All right, so anyway. Yeah, sorry about that.

SARAH LABRIE: We—I mean, I was a kid during the three-peat era.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, so she got all into it too.

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: So that locked into her brain. She was kind of obsessed also with Lance, who she had known.

And you said she would write stuff out, right? She would keep records, like, oh, there are these cars following me and stuff. Meanwhile, she's still trying to work the nursing job, too, right?

SARAH LABRIE: That's the thing. Before anybody really realized anything was wrong—I wouldn't have known because we weren't speaking—but I think because, as a nurse, she had to keep detailed notes about her patients, and she'd always kept journals, she started writing down her symptoms and saying, I'm being lasered in my private areas and my scalp. My teeth are being removed one by one and replaced. Or he's putting a dye on my teeth. Or he's putting a bug in my ear. There were all these physical symptoms she thought were happening.

One time she told me later, after she'd been diagnosed, that somebody had come in the night and taken her jaw and dislocated it and turned it to the side. And I was looking at her, and her face looked normal. But she thought—again, like with a dream, where you look at your face and it looks weird.

BLAIR HODGES: It all seems very dreamlike. Teeth stuff, for sure. Bugs in your ear—I’ve had these dreams.

Your grandma would update you on this stuff, too. It seemed like you'd get these calls from her. She'd be like, okay, this is kind of what's going on. But she also seemed kind of hesitant to get too involved with it or just thought your mom would snap out of it at some point.

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah. She was like, oh, you know, it's probably menopause. Or, you know, she has to drive so much for her job as a nurse, and the Houston traffic is making her lose it. It was kind of just like, well, once she gets the right job and figures it out. And meanwhile, my mom, who had gone through nursing school and—this isn't in the book because it isn't relevant, but she had also gone to law school and passed the bar in her early 20s. And then she chose not to practice.

But she was a functional, intelligent adult. Suddenly she has lost her home, is living in a building my grandmother owns, has married a stranger and divorced him. Her car is full of junk. The house is full of junk. Nothing she's saying or doing makes sense, but no one's doing anything about it.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

SARAH LABRIE: And I don't know, it just makes you wonder how many other people are living like this. Because we live in such a denial.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, without your grandma, she'd be on the streets, obviously. A lot of people with mental illness are there for that reason.

Here's another quote. You say, “In our family, it was policy to let fate take each person where it would, even if doing that meant failing to avert disaster.”

So there was also this feeling of, well, we don't necessarily need to get involved. We'll see what happens.

SARAH LABRIE: Absolutely. And that's why I was so glad you brought up that moment when my grandmother said, you have to go back to college, because that was so uncharacteristic of my family, that she did that. And I'm very grateful that she did.

But in general, when I was in college and I was so depressed, I would come home crying, and nobody would say anything. Nobody would acknowledge it. And that's why the book is in part about my depression and in part about my mom's severe mental illness. Nobody in my family ever acknowledged mental illness. It was just kind of a question of fake it till you make it. You just get through it, right?

 

Guilt, Fear, and Wonder – 35:01

 

BLAIR HODGES: And so for you, your reaction to this news about your mom, like you said, it really spun you around. And you talk in the book about how you were hit with guilt, for one—for not being aware of it or not being connected or, you know, what's going on there. And then that was also followed up by worrying about your own mental state. Like, is this my fate, too?

So walk me through this. It's this cocktail of feelings—guilt and worry. You're thinking about the past, what you hadn't done, but you're also thinking about your future and what could happen to you.

SARAH LABRIE: I was also thinking about maybe getting engaged, potentially having a child, suddenly understanding what my inheritance was and what I might pass on to a child if I were to have one. And this sort of reckoning with why I was the way I was.

As an adult, I had this constant hypervigilance. But I was also constantly getting into fights with my boyfriend over nothing, and trying to figure out why all this was happening.

Part of the reason I put that in the book is because I want people to understand that I didn't always act nobly. My first instinct was not to run to my mother's side and throw everything away so I could take care of her. I really was like, okay, what's going to happen to me? And I have a lot of guilt about that.

I wanted to write about that guilt because it's part of it. It's part of caring for a mentally ill loved one, especially one you have a complicated relationship with.

BLAIR HODGES: And when you're thinking about yourself—here's another quote—“What scares me most,” you say, “is my mother didn't know where her turning point was.” So you're also thinking, if this is heritable—and you learned more about your own family history as well, which people can read more about in the book—you’re thinking, how would I even know? Your mom doesn't even know.

SARAH LABRIE: It's something I still think about every day because I already felt like I was teetering on the brink as my novel was falling apart. That failure—I took that really, really hard because I had no backup plan.

I had gone to grad school, earned an MFA, got into several residencies, and got a really good agent based on the first 30 pages of this manuscript that I then just could not bring together and was realizing was never going to come together.

BLAIR HODGES: See, this also seems like a nightmare to me. I'll have dreams about math, where I'm supposed to—I can't graduate because there's this thing I can't finish. This thing I really want. You're experiencing this in your life of, okay, you got these first 30 pages done and then you can't finish it. It sounds like a nightmare.

SARAH LABRIE: Yes. And I had written probably a 300-page manuscript, but it wasn't good. It was just objectively not good.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

SARAH LABRIE: And I could not figure out how to make it good. I was stuck, and it was burying me.

BLAIR HODGES: The premise of it sounds really interesting. You describe it in the book where it's sort of about parallel worlds—this idea that every decision you make, now there's—like, I just watched Dark Matter, there's a show on this theme—but it's the idea that every choice we make creates a parallel universe where a different choice was made. And it's actually a real theory. There are parallel universes, right?

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: But you say your characters—you didn't like them. Mark, the main character, was hollow. There was just nothing to him?

SARAH LABRIE: Right. And I understand now that that was because Mark was a sublimation of some trauma I had been repressing. But I do want to say—not to go off on a tangent—when I was starting grad school in 2011, there was a NOVA documentary about the physicist Hugh Everett, who had discovered the many-worlds theory.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

SARAH LABRIE: And I started writing about the multiverse, and so did literally everyone else. I think that NOVA documentary—

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. thanks NOVA!

SARAH LABRIE: NOVA is why we have the multiverse Spider-Man movies, and Everything Everywhere All at Once, or whatever it's called, you know, Russian Doll. Everybody latched on. Everybody was like, whoa, and just started writing. And the race began. And I just fell behind because I couldn't finish my book. And then Russian Doll came out and—

 

Apophenia in Paris – 38:56

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And you're working on this novel. It's not working out. This may seem like a big swerve, but let's go to Paris. Because you go to Paris in 2012, and this is when you got into this philosopher Walter Benjamin. I've also heard it pronounced "Benyamin," but maybe that's just my pedantic philosophy friends from when I was working at the university? [laughter]

You got into this grand theory about the connection of all reality. Talk about what happened to you in Paris.

SARAH LABRIE: So I was a residential advisor for Writers in Paris, which is this NYU program I did as a summer job while I was getting my MFA. When I got there, basically my job was to advise undergrads who had come to Paris for creative writing class, but they didn't need or want me around. They were college students. They were like, please leave us alone to drink underage and try drugs or something.

So I was incredibly lonely. The people who were there were these kids and then extremely fancy writers the program brought in who all knew each other and wanted nothing to do with an MFA student. So I was just wandering the city all alone and reading.

I was reading The Arcades Project, which was this—I'll say it Benjamin, because I am pedantic—but Walter Benjamin had written about these gorgeous architectural feats, these covered shopping malls called the arcades, that he was using to represent turn-of-the-century Paris and the modern era and the consumer era.

It's sort of this collaged history of modern Paris that is also taking on the bourgeoisie and Marxism. There's a lot of philosophy in it. It's just this beautiful book. It's accessible and difficult at the same time. And it climbed into my head because basically the way he wrote it was by going into the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and just pulling archives and essays and primary sources and stamps and photographs and collaging them all together into this history.

And so when you're walking around Paris, it's very easy to be kind of like a magpie, where you're like, oh, that building is connected to this building and this argument and this—

BLAIR HODGES: Wasn't he sort of saying, too, it's hard to have a master narrative about everything? So if we just throw all this stuff into the pot, you get this gumbo of reality. You really can't tell a master narrative. The only thing you can do is get these refracted images of it based on art and buildings and essays and blah, blah, blah. Right?

SARAH LABRIE: I think he was trying to create a master narrative, and it made him crazy.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, good. I'm glad I asked.

SARAH LABRIE: Yes. And so I started trying to write a novel about a philosopher who's trying to create the equation of all things and figure out the equation of the multiverse and how you can travel through it and fix your mistakes. And that was based on Walter Benjamin, because he had started this out—I think he tried to publish it as an essay about Baudelaire, who was a poet who would flâneur, right? Who would just wander Paris and write about it.

And then it just became this bigger and bigger thing, and he couldn't get it published. His friends were all like, what the hell are you doing? This is crazy. I don't even know what you're talking about. But he couldn't stop.

In the end, he ended up dying before he finished it. But he probably was never going to finish it. It was the same thing that happened to me with my novel, where I just couldn't give up, even though the thing I was doing had long ago stopped making sense.

BLAIR HODGES: See, it's another parallel world in your book. So I'm seeing your parallel world of you thinking about you and your mom, intergenerationally. But then you're also thinking about this parallel world of this philosopher you're relating to, who we will call Benjamin.

SARAH LABRIE: Exactly. And I think it is also crazy for me to compare myself to Walter Benjamin, and I am aware of that—for you scholars out there. But I did really find a kinship with this person.

BLAIR HODGES: Didn't you start to see things, too? You started to feel like the world was shifting under your feet because you started to see patterns and stuff. And this idea of seeing patterns, maybe where there isn't a pattern—there's a term for this, apophenia. It's a delusion of connectedness, and it's sometimes connected to schizophrenia and things like that. So you're wondering about that?

SARAH LABRIE: Absolutely. I actually tried to call the book Apophenia at one point, and I sent that to my agent, and she just didn't write back. No reply, no response. I was like, okay, I guess it's not that one.

But yeah, there was a line in the book that ended up coming out during revisions, where I wrote that one of the major symptoms of schizophrenia is seeing patterns in everything. But that doesn't negate the fact that there are patterns in everything. There are patterns that overlay everything. And how do you—

I could see those patterns, and I could feel myself leaning into them and being driven crazy by them. And it's just the thinnest of lines between the patterns that actually exist and what apophenia is, which can be a symptom of psychosis.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. One that comes to mind is how tree roots grow, and then veins in our bodies, and there are these similar ways those grow. That's fascinating.

SARAH LABRIE: Right. So I started seeing—I was walking around Paris all alone that summer—and I saw, okay, the river, the Seine, looks just like these trees that are everywhere because Paris is covered in trees. And, oh, that looks just like my fingers branching off from my hand. And the subway map that I'm looking at all the time—the same branching shape is everywhere.

And I know this is the math that governs the universe. How can I know that? I'm not a physicist. I'm not allowed to know things like that. I must be crazy.

But then the craziest thing is that years later, an artist had commissioned me to write the opening essay for an exhibition booklet. And so I was researching these branches because she was a printmaker and mostly did prints of trees.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

SARAH LABRIE: And I found this book by this physicist named Adrian Bejan, who taught at Duke, where he was like, you are correct. Yes. It's called the Constructal Law. Everything grows according to this pattern. And it's not just things that grow naturally. It's also in architecture. It's in the technological world as well. The same pattern is everywhere.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Like the way gravity works and the way messages are conveyed follow these same patterns.

SARAH LABRIE: Exactly. It's the way things grow. Anything that is growing in any way most efficiently will grow in the same pattern as a tree or a slime mold or a subway system or a city. It's all—

And even in the book, he says the reason this isn't talked about more is because civilians can see it. We're so used to things being siloed and coming these discoveries coming from smaller and smaller niches. But this one is so broad and so universal, it doesn't get talked about or written about.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Like, what field would it even fit into? Also, I think if you think about it too much, it does start to drive you a little out of your mind! An obsession with it might become problematic.

You talk to a therapist about this later on. I liked hearing the therapist was basically like, well, hey, what if you were right about that? And you're like, oh, okay, maybe I'm okay then. Maybe I'm okay to think that. [laughter]

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah!

 

Parallel Universes – 46:06

 

BLAIR HODGES: Now, is this editor you are talking about the one who didn't write back about your title? Is this Jill? You mentioned somebody—

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah, no, this is my agent.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, agent. And Jill was an editor?

SARAH LABRIE: No, no, no—my agent, too. Both stories are about agents. But the second agent, the one who didn't write back, is my current agent, and she's wonderful.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, okay. Was Jill wonderful, or can you say? [laughs]

SARAH LABRIE: Jill was wonderful. But I think this is something that was very frustrating to me for this book. There was this moment—2020, kind of the post–George Floyd era—

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I wanted to ask you about this.

SARAH LABRIE: This idea of sort of Blackness being in the zeitgeist in a certain form that my book didn't necessarily correspond to was something I felt like I ran directly up against. She was like, well, can we make this basically Blacker? And then we can ride the sort of social media wave—I shouldn't say this, but—ride the social media wave that would come from that if you became this character online.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, she's seeing topics that are becoming topical and she's like, if you lean in that direction—and since you're a Black author, why wouldn't you? And some people, like your friend Sadie, would really lean hard into that. And some amazing works have been created because of that.

SARAH LABRIE: Absolutely.

BLAIR HODGES: But an amazing work won't come from an editor suggesting to someone who doesn't have that within them or isn't driven that way to try and make that happen artificially.

For you, it's not that you didn't care about that stuff, but it wasn't what you were writing about. It wasn't coming from you, the way you describe it in the book.

SARAH LABRIE: Exactly. And no shade to her at all. She was just trying to help me sell this book that was slowly killing me. And she could see that. But there was no way to suddenly retrofit this book into that kind of story, because that wasn't the kind of story I'd set out to write.

BLAIR HODGES: No. She did make a suggestion, though. She said, what if you wrote about your mother? And you say, “I can't. I don't know how. I can't find a logical thread in it for what's happening to my mother. 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.”

But what's interesting about your memoir is it's very impressionistic. You give us different scenes. So it's funny to me that you're like, I can't find a logical thread. Is there an underlying logical thread in the book that you ended up finding, or did you decide you didn't need one to do this book?

SARAH LABRIE: So the novel, The Anatomy Book, I was writing according to these sort of classical rules of structure. I was trying to make it very—every sentence needed to be perfect, every scene needed to be perfect, every line needed to be perfect. I wanted this to be a book that would be front and center at your Barnes & Noble or your Hudson Books. And I thought that's what a book would have to be.

So I thought if I were to write about my family, it would have to be something like three generations of Black women. Here's the research. Here are the archives. Here's the travel that I did. It's 500 pages long. It's going to win awards. That kind of book. And I knew that I did not know how to do that, and I didn't want to do that.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, okay.

SARAH LABRIE: But then at a certain point, because I had to tell the story of what was happening to my mom, I followed that desire line and the emotions it sparked, and I wrote toward that. A structure emerged from that—not on its own, because I did do several passes of this with an editor—and it was very important to me that it be a story, that it be a complete story, that it not just feel like a bunch of vignettes or fully impressionistic.

I needed it to feel like there was some catharsis for the reader at the end. That was very important to me. But I stopped trying to force this perfect external shape onto it, and I let the story tell me what it needed to be.

BLAIR HODGES: What I ended up seeing were these parallel universes. And what you didn't do was shove that in my face and say, this is what I'm doing. But when you're talking about—I'm going to call him "Benjamin" because of who I am [laughter]—when you're talking about Benjamin, you're not dragging me through the point you're making. But if I'm paying attention, I'm picking up on it—how this connects and how it's kind of a parallel universe with you, and your worries about whether you could lose your mind in ways your mother did.

She is a parallel universe to you. And there are other examples, like Sadie. You describe a sexual assault you experienced earlier in your life. And when the "Me Too" movement happened, your friend Sadie, without talking to you about it, decided to speak publicly about it. She didn't name you, but she spoke publicly about your experience. And this created a rift that ended up not ever being resolved.

There was a parallel reality in the way you experienced that sexual assault and processed it yourself, maybe wouldn't have talked about it publicly—or if you would, you would have done it differently—and then her parallel version of that, too. So I'm seeing that as well, these parallel realities.

SARAH LABRIE: Absolutely. And it's that same sort of Constructal Law formation of the shape the multiverse takes, where everything's constantly branching and there are all these different versions of stories and worlds and what could have happened.

There was a moment in the book where I say, well, in another world, I write back to an email that Sadie sent me, and we resolve things and we are friends. And that world might exist somewhere.

I mean, she was incredibly important to me—not only in college but afterwards. She was the one who was like, you have to be relentless. We wrote side by side. We applied to grad school side by side. It was very—

BLAIR HODGES: And she became very successful, too. 

SARAH LABRIE: And she was this sort of lodestar for me. And I don't want to discount that. That's just as important. And there is definitely a world somewhere where we were able to make it through this rupture. But in this world, we couldn't.

BLAIR HODGES: Is there a world where she's read your book? This book?

SARAH LABRIE: Oh, God, I don't know. I don't want to know.

BLAIR HODGES: You don't even want to know?

SARAH LABRIE: I don't want to know. But I think one point I want to make is that I am not healthy. I'm not fixed. My reactions to things are not the reactions of a healthy person. This is not a book about, I'm better. It's just a book about what happened to me.

So that maybe if this happens to other people and they read this book, they know they're not the first person it's happened to. They're not alone. It's not about me being better or good, even. I'm not saying that's the way to react to a broken friendship. I'm just saying it's the way that I have to, for my own self-protection.

BLAIR HODGES: As a reminder to our listeners, we're talking to Sarah Labrie about her memoir, No One Gets to Fall Apart. It was a New York Times Editor’s Pick. It was also named a best book of the year by outlets like Elle, NPR, and Esquire.

 

The Life Cannibal – 52:50

 

BLAIR HODGES: Sarah, as you said, you’re not presenting yourself in the book as the model of great mental health who has everything figured out. You're trying to figure yourself out while witnessing your own mother's declining mental health. And about a year or so after your mom had that mental breakdown and your grandmother called you about it, you experienced your own breakdown—or, well, I can't remember. Do you use that word?

SARAH LABRIE: I don't think I used it.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, I don't want to put that on you if it's not your language. How would you describe your experience?

SARAH LABRIE: It felt like an eruption. I had been repressing so much pain and so much anger without even really knowing that I was doing it, because I was so used to not speaking about the things that were happening to me. And then at a certain point, it all came together and just exploded.

BLAIR HODGES: It's a dramatic confession. You describe taking all your books and throwing them out in the street, and your papers and the things that belong to the writerly part of yourself. It's like you wanted to be rid of those things because you were sick of writing. And you say that you'd been living your life almost like an outside observer to it, like you have this writer self that would keep a record of it and kind of watch it happening.

Here's how you describe it in the book. You say, “I'm so terribly sick of cannibalizing myself for art, writing short stories about women who are like me but are not me. Always on the lookout for anything in the real world that can be dragged into the narrative one and exploited. Always separate from my own life so I can witness and describe it.” You call it an outsider status in your own life?

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah. I think that outsider status—I didn't know this at the time, and I actually learned it from a podcast called Stuff Your Therapist Reads, if I'm allowed to shout out that podcast.

BLAIR HODGES: Absolutely. That is a terrific podcast.

SARAH LABRIE: Isn't it? These professional therapists read memoirs like mine and apply a professional therapeutic perspective. And one of the things they said was that my childhood had kind of forced an outsider perspective onto me because I was so used to being dismissed or ignored. And I think that's exactly right.

But I very quickly alchemized that into writing. I'm lucky that I came to fiction so early that I was able to sublimate all of that into just the craft of writing and trying to become better and better at that. But the problem is that I didn't ever address the underlying symptom of being a total outsider in my own life. I was always narrating everything.

I saw that as a strength because it meant that I could write. But also, it's a really hard way to live.

BLAIR HODGES: It sounds exhausting to me because then, yeah, you have to be an editor all the time.

SARAH LABRIE: All the time.

BLAIR HODGES: Over reality.

SARAH LABRIE: Exactly.

BLAIR HODGES: Did you feel like, when you're throwing your books away, did the thought occur to you, like, I'm going to have to write about this?

SARAH LABRIE: No. I was trying to kill that part of me. I don't want to do that anymore. And it's the title, No One Gets to Fall Apart. I was trying to fall apart because I did not want to be conscious anymore. But the problem is that you can't do that on purpose.

I was like, I'm not running away from psychosis anymore. I'm not running away from failure. I'm done. I'm done, I'm done. Just take me. And it doesn't work. When you ask for it, it won't come. My realization from that was—can I—

BLAIR HODGES: Have you read your realization? Actually, this is on page 171. I love this paragraph here. Let me get there.

SARAH LABRIE: Okay.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay. So I'll set this up. In this excerpt, Ethan discovers what's going on. So he comes home and there's this mess, and you seem to be just losing it. And this is kind of how you're reacting when Ethan's like, I think you want to be crazy, he tells you.

SARAH LABRIE: I can tell Ethan is afraid. This outburst is the first small step toward my following in my mother's footsteps. I don't know how to explain to him that now that I have decided to throw myself into the void I've spent my whole life sidestepping, it turns out it wasn't actually there. The pain that I wanted to rip my consciousness to pieces did not. The world went on, and nothing changed. I kick back through the pile of objects spread out across the bedroom floor and burst into the hallway.

BLAIR HODGES: So this caught me completely by surprise, that at the moment of your biggest apparent break is when you gained confidence that you wouldn't lose your mind.

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah, because I kind of opened the door and nothing was there. Nothing came in. I still had to just be myself and keep going. There was nothing under—it was like I had been waiting my whole life for the floor to just fall away underneath me and to plunge into the darkness below.

And then I was finally like, fine, I'll just dive in. And there was nothing. There was just more floor. There was nothing there. There was nowhere for me to go.

BLAIR HODGES: Maybe in a parallel world, right? You just completely lost it.

SARAH LABRIE: Right.

 

EXCERPT: The Time Portal Back to Houston – 57:41

 

BLAIR HODGES: But so you gained this confidence. You found steady ground under your feet again. You gained the confidence to do this book that we're talking about. And you also felt well enough to visit your mom. You visited Houston. And it's sort of like a time portal, the way you describe it.

Whenever people go back to their hometown, if they don't still live in the town they grew up in—I could recognize this feeling so much—you're driving these streets and, man, it's like it's in your blood. But it's also different. So you're in a parallel reality of its own because things aren't the same. You see things from your childhood and you're back in time, but then you go to where your mom's living, your grandmother's place, and it's a total wreck. And then you're back here in the present with all this reality. Or maybe this could be your own future apartment, who knows, where things have unraveled for you.

But you had the uncanny feeling, you say, that you're in two places at once on this trip back to Houston.

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah, that's exactly it. It's when you go back to your hometown and you're like the age you were when you left, but you're also the age you are now. You can see the person you left behind by leaving the city, and you're just existing in two times at once. Especially Houston, which has stayed the same in a lot of ways since the 70s.

For a long time my neighborhood looked exactly the same. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, there's all these townhouses in Third Ward, which is this Black neighborhood that used to have all these mansions that had been cut up into apartments. So you're just seeing this palimpsest of time layered over time, layered over time.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Well, I thought we would end with a long excerpt from the book. If you wouldn't mind reading this. This is on page 187, and this is from that visit back to Houston.

SARAH LABRIE: Okay, sounds good. Oh, I should probably set this up a little bit. My grandmother's office is a building that she ran a business out of for many years, but she has retired and has given the space to my mother to live.

My mother is in her rooms at the office with the shades pulled down when I go to visit her that afternoon.

She opens the glass-paned front door before I can knock. It turns out she has not been ignoring me. She's had her phone off all day because the voices in her head have been plaguing her. I can see the tension in her face now as she tries to ignore them.

“I made you some lunch,” she says and gestures at a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and banana and an apple and a kiwi.

This small act, peanut butter spread on Wonder Bread, sliced in half and placed in a Ziploc bag, neatly undoes me. I once thought the trauma in my family served simply as an obstacle I had to overcome to achieve greatness. Remembering this now, I swallow the bile that rises in my throat.

She crosses the room and retrieves a cup of muddy brown liquid, which she hands to me. “I made you some molasses tea,” she says. “It's good for you. Cleans you right out.” She has warmed the tea up on a metal space heater in the corner, which she turned on, presumably to cook with, even though it's almost 100 degrees outside.

Something is growing in a speckled black pattern across the painted windowsill that looks out onto the front yard. It gives the room a fetid smell.

We move into the second room where my mother keeps a small flat mattress on the floor next to a box of what looks like dried leaves. I ask her about the box. She tells me she was starved for eight days by my grandmother and Aunt Tina. She ate dandelions, soaking them in hot water to cook. She believes the food they brought her was tainted.

I ask her if the thoughts go away when she takes her meds. She reminds me that Hakeem Olajuwon said she doesn't have to take her medication anymore.

I think if the patterns I saw in Paris meant what I thought they did—if everything that grows is shaped like a branching tree, and if the core of that shape is the trunk that runs through it—then life itself is that trunk and all of us are branches, elements of a process of death and rebirth that progresses along a continuum we will never be able to see.

Both of us, my mother and I, are a step toward something new, and our lives are part of something bigger, something flawed but changing.

I wipe down the mildewed surfaces and empty the containers of rotting oatmeal and straighten up the books and take my mother's dirty clothes down to the washing machine in the basement and open the windows so air can come in, and then I clean her pencil drawings off the wall with a damp cloth and cleaning spray.

She watches me, wary, her voice caught in loops.

“I'm so sorry, Sarah. I'm just”—the story of Lance Blanks's harassment coming out of her over and over in waves. “If I try to go outside right now, other people will come out and walk real fast in front of me. They pretend to have conversations. They just materialize in front of me. I try to go to church and Lance has gotten to the pastor so I can tell nothing he's saying is real. They push the collection plate in my face like they can tell I don't have anything to put in it. I went to a different church. Lance followed me there, so I stopped trying. It was a waste of my time.”

She points to cracks in the wall, tells me they are Lance attempting to communicate with her in secret messages only she can interpret. “He puts these there to remind me,” she says.

Outside, I gulp fresh air like water and sob a little, then call Ethan, who makes comforting noises in the form of words I can't comprehend.

I am remembering a night when I was 7 years old and my mother left me at home alone to go for a jog around the neighborhood. I ran out of the apartment into the street in a panic because I didn't know where she was. I fell and scraped my knees on the sidewalk.

When she heard me crying, she came running back, shouting and angry because I needed her so badly, because she could never do anything alone. Though years have passed, the fear in my heart that she has gone forever and I've been left behind remains.

I will get over the loss of Sadie. Since when a friend says you're no longer friends, then you're no longer friends. But there is nothing my mother or I can say that will stop her from being my mother. And where she's run away to is not a physical place. And so I cannot chase her there or convince her to run back to me.

 

For Lance Blanks – 01:03:54

 

BLAIR HODGES: That's Sarah Labrie reading from her book, No One Gets to Fall Apart. Sarah, at one point I flipped to the end before I'd finished reading the book. I flipped to the end and saw your acknowledgments, and I was stunned to see Lance Blanks was the first person you thanked. And I hadn't finished the book. So I wondered if this was a literary device of sort of saying, you're a part of my mom's life somehow.

But you actually got in contact with Lance?

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah. He happened to see my wedding announcement in the New York Times, and through a person we both knew—I didn't know that he knew—he reached out and said congratulations. He hadn't known that my mom was sick. He hadn't heard anything about her. And so I set up a couple calls with him.

I really learned a lot about their relationship. But then this was right before COVID, and he actually wound up taking his own life after COVID. The book was in its final stages of editing, and I hadn't reached out to him because I wanted to send him the finished copy.

And I found out from my editor, actually, on a notes call, that he had passed away a month before. So yeah, it's devastating. He was, by all accounts, a wonderful person. He was incredibly kind to me. And it's a huge loss.

BLAIR HODGES: I'm really sorry to hear that. It mentioned that he was gone, but I didn't know he had died by suicide. That's even more tragic.

 

Sarah and Her Mother Today – 01:05:41

 

BLAIR HODGES: And with your mom, how is she doing now? Because you leave us in the book, I think, a little uncertain.

SARAH LABRIE: Yeah. I didn't want to present a happy ending, but I also wanted to present a hopeful ending. I think so many books about schizophrenia are, understandably, completely tragic. But one thing that did really work for us was that my grandmother allowed my mother to be who she was and who she needed to be until she decided herself that she would go into a group home and stay there and take medication.

And because of that, she is medicated now. She is under treatment. She is safe. I don't know that a group home long term is the way anyone would necessarily want to live, so I'm hoping this isn't the final landing place for her.

BLAIR HODGES: But are you in touch with her?

SARAH LABRIE: To some degree. It's hard because she was very abusive when I was younger, and she hasn't changed. That doesn't go away just because you're taking antipsychotics. She's still not very nice to me often. But I know that she loves me, and those conflicting feelings are a lot to deal with. So I would say I do not go out of my way to spend time with her.

BLAIR HODGES: When you're finishing this piece, you're talking about being there in Houston with her and the lunch she made and how that pulled at you so hard, and you're cleaning up for her and she's telling you these panicky things. And then you go to this memory of when you were seven and she'd left you to go for a jog.

Does that kind of thing come up in the moment as you're writing? How are you making that moment happen in your book? Because it's such a beautiful and sad juxtaposition to put that memory there. When does that happen?

SARAH LABRIE: That was a memory I had written, I think, in Scrivener. And I kept coming back to it and thinking about how to expand it or how to fit it in. And then it was one of those things where you just kind of are puzzle-piecing these moments together.

But I do have to give credit to my writing community. It was my friend Steph Cha, who is an incredible fiction writer—she wrote a book called Your House Will Pay and she lives in LA—and she had done an editing pass on the book for me. She read it and was the one who wrote a note saying, this is interesting because the parallel to Sadie is that a friendship breakup can be a final thing, but you can't have a final breakup with a parent because they'll always be your blood.

That was sort of just a passing reflection. And I was like, I have to incorporate this. This is absolutely true. Of course. Why didn't I see that? So that final sentence was thanks to Steph.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 01:08:24

 

BLAIR HODGES: Cool. I always like to close with regrets, challenges, & surprises. And you can speak to any of these. Anything that you would change about the book now that it's out? What was the hardest part about writing it for you? Or how did it personally challenge you as a person? Or if there are any surprises or revelations you had because you did this project. You don't have to speak to all three of those. And you know, there's another parallel universe where you answered differently.

SARAH LABRIE: So that's true, I guess. Right? There's no opportunity wasted or lost.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes.

SARAH LABRIE: Some version of you is taking advantage of it in every world. I would say my regrets and surprises are connected.

Regrets-wise, I would rewrite so many sentences just on the sentence level. Even just now when I was reading for you, there's a sentence where I use the word “ignore” back to back in two sentences. There's another paragraph where I use the word “clean” back to back. Those little nitpicky things, I'm like, ah. There's a paragraph where I use the word “implore.” That's not a word I would ever use. Why did I put that in there? [laughter]

I think it's because it goes through so many editing passes and people have suggestions. And then by the time it's gone through three or four rounds of editing from your professional editor—I had friends edit it—the copy edit pass, the legal pass, you're just so tired. You're just like, get it away from me.

BLAIR HODGES: "I implore you to finish this book."

SARAH LABRIE: Exactly. And now I'm like, I'm going to write an email to my editor after this being like, can we please change that in the paperback? I would never, ever—I didn't even know that was in there. How did we let that in? But you've read the book 75 times.

BLAIR HODGES: Exactly.

SARAH LABRIE: And then you're also kind of going back and forth with the copy editor and the legal edit person. And they're not there to make the book read better, necessarily. They're there to make sure that, in my case, HarperCollins was covered and that the copy editing is correct. And I didn't know enough to push back on some things sometimes.

I think for my next book, I'll know I don't have to take every suggestion the copy editor is giving me, because they are just suggestions.

BLAIR HODGES: See, this is good stuff, though, because this is about your craft. This is technical. But what was surprising about that? Just that you had “implore” in there?

SARAH LABRIE: No. That I had worked so hard to write this book that I thought was going to make me the next Zadie Smith, and that the prose was beautiful, if nothing else. I wasn't always saying anything, and the book was not going anywhere, but the sentences were fantastic.

And when I gave that up and wrote a book that I was allowing to be messy, that I would allow to have messy sentences, that was not perfect, that could not—you know, this is not New Yorker-style prose—that book, every step of the way, I was surprised. I was surprised when my agent was like, great, this is ready. I'm going to put it on submission. I was surprised when it sold pretty much right away. I was surprised when I made the New York Times Notable Book List and got really amazing professional critical reviews.

Because I think I'm such an overachiever and such a perfectionist, I could only see—I think I tend to minimize my accomplishments. And so the fact that people have responded to it, people are still asking me to do podcasts, people are responding to it emotionally—what they're responding to is my own emotional investment in the book.

I think I was so used to hiding my emotions with this sheen of perfection, and it turns out nobody wanted that. That's not the thing that was going to make me a writer. It was being honest and true to myself and telling the story I had to tell.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. From my own personal experience, it's interesting to hear that. Because sometimes books that get the notoriety that yours got, they're not going to do a smaller podcast like mine. I mean, I only have, I don't know, 1,500 or 2,000 listeners right now. So yeah, people are like, I don't know, this guy's not Terry Gross. I'm not going to do it.

SARAH LABRIE: What are you talking about? Paul Scheer did your podcast.

BLAIR HODGES: He did. But, you know, it's Paul. He's just too nice to say no, I think. That's Paul's problem. [laughs]

SARAH LABRIE: I can't speak for other authors, but it doesn't matter what kind of accolades you get. It doesn't change the way you see yourself. I'm never going to feel it's Terry Gross or nothing. It's always just like, wow, people are reading my book. It exists in the world.

BLAIR HODGES: I loved it. It's so good. I read it over the course of a couple days. My family had gone out of town, and I wasn't planning on doing it yet. I mean, I'd reached out to you on Instagram and just kind of had it in my future pile. But there just came this moment where I was like, oh, this is a short book. I can read this right now. And I really had a good time with it.

It's not an easy beach read or anything. I don't know, maybe some people like to get kind of messed up and sad about schizophrenia when they're on the beach.

SARAH LABRIE: Well, I thank you so much for pulling me up in your pile, and I hope I lived up to your expectations.

BLAIR HODGES: You did. This is great. Thanks for joining me. I really appreciate it.

SARAH LABRIE: Thank you so much. This was a really fantastic conversation.

But will you tell me the truth? When you got to the word “implore” in that paragraph, were you like, what is this writer doing?

BLAIR HODGES: Where was it at exactly? Lemme look.

SARAH LABRIE: It's right after that moment you asked me to read, when I'm kind of having that breakdown and Ethan comes home and is like, what are you doing? And I say, “We usually have to talk through everything. No one's allowed to go to bed mad,” in that paragraph.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, I think I remember. I thought you were elevating things because of that moment, that it was melodramatic. I remember. Yeah, I remember seeing it now. I have it highlighted here. [laughter]

SARAH LABRIE: Really? Yeah. Well, I'm glad that's how it came across. I think what happened was that that was a note either my husband or my editor had given me—some kind of wording in that paragraph. They had given me a suggested wording, and I put it in, and then I didn't go back and fix it because it was so late. I have never written the word “implore” on my own in any form.

BLAIR HODGES: You should get an “implore” tattoo.

SARAH LABRIE: "I implore you." [laughs] But it was kind of like a non-writer editing and being like, "you fix this. You're the writer." And I didn't fix it.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, I personally implore listeners to check out the book No One Gets to Fall Apart, a memoir by Sarah Labrie. And I implore them—I implore everyone listening to me—to check out this book. [laughter]

SARAH LABRIE: Thank you.

 

Outro – 01:14:39

 

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to Relationscapes. If this is your first time joining me, welcome to the journey. And if this episode resonated with you, I'd like to recommend fellow traveler episodes. You might try out Guinevere Turner's interview, called “Coming of Age in a Cult and Beyond.” It explores themes of family turmoil.

I also recommend Dr. Mariel Buqué’s episode. It's called “Healing from Family Trauma.” I recommend that for obvious reasons.

If you're enjoying the podcast, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts. You can also rate it in Spotify.

Mates of State provides our theme song. I'm your host, Blair Hodges, an independent journalist in Salt Lake City, and I hope to spend more time with you soon here on Relationscapes.