These two would not even make the short list in a hypothetical Guinness Book of Halfway Decent Parents: American painter Jennifer Bartlett (1941-2022) and German actor Mathieu Carrière (1950-). Their daughter, Alice Carrière, has written an arresting memoir in large part about the deleterious effects of their parenting, but Everything/Nothing/Someone is also about the more universal trial of searching for one's identity while living in the shadows of larger-than-life figures. The book begins with Carrière's Greenwich Village childhood, during which her mother parented from a distance that she filled with her staff. (No starving artist was Bartlett, whose outsize wall piece Rhapsody made her art-world successful in 1976.) Conversely, Carrière's father didn't parent from a remove, but that was the problem. His emotional intimacy verged on the sexual, producing all the expected psychological confusion: the author writes that her father "made me feel seen and wanted in a way my mother didn't." Carrière's parents split up when she was six; she would begin cutting at age seven to manage her anxiety.
A Northern gothic coming-of-age story, Everything/Nothing/Someone chronicles Carrière's mental health problems, which would precipitate multiple hospitalizations and a multitude of meds. The memoir's steady flow of outlandish incidents can sometimes have a static quality, but the writing is so lovely and gingerly that it carries the day. After Carrière makes her peace with her mother toward the end of Bartlett's life, her hand "felt like silverware wrapped in a warm silk napkin, her bones slippery under her thin, hot skin." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer