“I love fast-paced, funny, tragic memoirs you can read in a day and I tend to read them compulsively, so that was basically the form this book came out in from the start.” -Sarah LaBrie
Sarah LaBrie is a TV writer, memoirist and librettist. She was most recently a producer on the HBO and Starz television show, Minx. She has also written on Blindspotting (Starz), Made for Love (HBO MAX), and Love, Victor (Hulu/Disney). Her libretti have been performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall with music written by Pulitzer-prize winning composer Ellen Reid. Her fiction also appears in Guernica, The Literary Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her first book, a memoir entitled No One Gets to Fall Apart, will be published by HarperCollins this fall.
In August, we’ll be joined in conversation with three writers – Sarah LaBrie (No One Gets to Fall Apart), Erin Quinn-Kong (Hate Follow), and Cherry Lou Sy (Love Can’t Feed You) – who are just days away from the publication of their debut books. We’ll discuss their journeys so far from idea to the book deal & all of the preparation for publication – everything that makes up the unique and thrilling experience of publishing your first book.
This is the first of a special two-part Third Thursday that will cover the path to publication. In November, we’ll welcome our panelists back for a follow-up conversation to hear how those exciting days post-publication unfolded.
Here’s what Sarah had to share with us in advance of our August event:
Scribe: What was the inspiration for your book?
Sarah LaBrie: No One Gets to Fall Apart is about the year my mother was diagnosed with late-in-life schizophrenia. It was incredibly confusing and awful and no one in my family understood the disorder at all, least of all me. I was never not going to write about that. I’d been taking notes of course, but the actual manuscript structure is inspired by books like Heartberries by Therese Marie Mailhot and How to Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell. I love fast-paced, funny, tragic memoirs you can read in a day and I tend to read them compulsively, so that was basically the form this book came out in from the start.
Scribe: From idea stage to completed manuscript, how long did it take you to write your book?
SL: I wrote the first draft very quickly in the summer of 2017, while everything was still happening, and then I wrote and rewrote (and rewrote and rewrote) for the next four years. But actually, even after it sold in 2021, I had to rewrite it. I don’t think I had a manuscript I could consider “finished” until 2023. So, six years? Wow. That’s a long time.
Scribe: Has there been a moment of epiphany in terms of your work, when you thought, “This is it! Now I know what I’m doing?” How long did that feeling last?
SL: No! I wish. I basically just drafted and revised until I physically and mentally couldn’t anymore. I will say I got incredible advice from the editor who acquired my book, Jenny Xu, who is now at S&S. She encouraged me to organize the handful of subjects I was writing about–my mother’s schizophrenia, my literary ambition, my angsty, broken friendships, my own depression and my fixation on Walter Benjamin’s failure to finish his epic history of modern Paris, The Arcades Project–in layers rather than parts. That helped me rethink not just the manuscript, but the way I understood my mother and her life and mine.
Scribe: Was there a moment of doubt or struggle while writing your book, and how did you push through that moment to keep going?
SL: I’d spent the previous six years writing a different book, a novel, that I felt certain was going to break me. That experience was so tough that any difficulty I faced writing this memoir just could not compare. The fact that No One Gets to Fall Apart’s narrative structure came out of me whole on the first try, with the ending intact, felt like a miracle. I felt like I had a duty to work until the book was as good as it could possibly be. I also remember feeling so lost when my mother first began exhibiting psychosis symptoms that it seemed like if I could help other people in a similar situation navigate that space I had to do it, no matter what. I definitely still procrastinated and rewrote every single sentence a million times, but every day I got to work on it and make it better was a gift.
Scribe: What’s one piece of advice you would go back and give yourself (or someone else) during the early days of your project?
SL: I guess if I’d know it was going to work out, I would have stressed less and tried to get here faster. It would be nice to be on my second book by now. But I also know time is part of the equation.
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Thanks, Sarah!
Click here to learn more about our August Third Thursday Panel.
