Everything/Nothing/Someone is the 2023 memoir of 39 year old Alice Carriere whose only claim to fame is that she was the only child of a famous artist and actor. One review said, “At 35 she has quite a lot to tell.” She thinks she does, but does not. But like Jefferson Airplane taught us: “Go ask Alice.”
It’s a New York Times bestseller and Amazon has it rated 4.4/5 with 543 rantings. I could barely finish the book. Those rating it highest evidence a certain amount of wokeness in their thoughts. Those few ranking it lower view it as one more poor, little, rich girl “hard” life tale.
She doesn’t mean for it, I don’t think, to be a condemnation of psychiatry, but I think it is. She recognizes that her mother has suffered from the Satanic Panic caused by psychiatrists and psychologists of the 1980’s with their new ‘discovery’ of recovered memories. Her mother was eventually told by these experts in effect, “just kidding”, but Alice recognizes that those implanted memories became reality. Her mother never recovered from the stories of sexual abuse and satanic rituals. Though none of them were real, Alice says her mother never outlived those terrors even when they were exposed as psychiatric fraud.
Alice tale then goes into her own psychiatric nightmare. Her stories of being medication upon medication are almost unbelievable. Her confinement in psychiatric wards, most times voluntary and once longer than a year, are harrowing. Through this, Alice realizes that the medicine was in fact the disease. Think for a moment what a huge admission that is for someone thoroughly immersed, still today, in all things psychiatric.
Then she proceeds to relate in a dispassionate, dissociative way her actor father ‘mercy’ killing his German psychiatrist father, mother, and sister in-turn. These ‘murders’ took place years after his own older brother had killed himself in that family home. To my knowledge, only Ernest Hemmingway has more suicides in his family. His father, self, brother, and sister all took their own life.
Her relationship with her mother is strained, with her father disconcerting, but it’s her relationship with psychology, phycologists, psychotropics proscribed and otherwise that tell the tale. Is this really no more proof of the bankruptcy of the principles and practices of psychology vis-à-vis results, methods, and ethics, than the stories of someone abused by religion, Christian or others, that Hollywood and True Crime love to tell?
I don’t know. Go ask this Alice and the least she will say is what Alice said in 1967: “One pill makes you larger/ One pill makes you small/ And the ones that mother gives you/ Don’t do anything at all”