Book Review: Everything Nothing Someone

Title: Everything Nothing Someone 

Author: Alice Carriere

Date: 2023

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

ISBN: 978-1-954118-29-4

Length: 288 pages

Quote: "I had to go looking for her to find out what she wanted. By the time I found her she didn’t seem to care why she had called me in the first place."

Alice Carriere's mother, the artist known as Jennifer Bartlett, made her art and her name out of what may have been "Prozac Dementia." The 1980s saw a specific manifestation of this disorder that was called "Satanic Panic," in which brains seeking explanation for the nerve pain and muscle cramps the drugs caused drew their inspiration from a purported memoir called Michelle Remembers, describing ritual torture at the hand of Satanist cult groups. No sane mind would have made up such horrible accusations, but no solid evidence for the stories the patients told was found. The writer of Michelle Remembers recalled, for example, having had devil horns surgically implanted on her head, but she didn't have horns, or scars where they might have been implanted and then removed. She did have headaches.

Were there Satanists in the 1980s? Yes. Was one of their major groups based near the church college I attended? Yes. Did I know Satanists personally? Yes. Did they do horrible things to each other, to animals, or to people they claimed as friends? Yes--they took drugs, they shared drugs, they broke their opposite-sex friends' hearts and drove their same-sex friends mad with grief and worry, and the whole purpose of their cult seemed to be to torture their parents. They weren't very nice to the schools and employers their parents hoped would set them on the right path in life, either. And some of them did "sacrifice" animals; and two of them were the drug manufacturers the young property owner later to be known as David Koresh evicted from Mount Carmel House. But did they use children in sadistic sex rituals, or did they merely become unfit parents if they sobered up enough to be allowed to rear their young? Mostly the latter. I wouldn't put it past some of them to have tortured children but I suspect most of them were just too stoned to do much more than, perhaps, share drugs with children.

That Jennifer Bartlett could never substantiate her hair-raising stories may prove that the Evil Principle takes care of its own, or it may prove that Bartlett's memories were drug-induced...whether her parents, her doctor, or people on the street supplied the drugs. Anyway, she demonstrated the pattern of mental illness known as dissociative mental disorder, and trained her child to dissociate too. The drugs young Alice so willingly took, mostly prescription drugs, definitely helped the mental illness along.

"Alice" was an interesting choice of a name for her daughter. Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Alice in Wonderland were the best known characters associated with this name, but then there were Go Ask Alice and Through the Broken Mirror With Alice, two young adult novels that were written to encourage my generation to say no to drugs. One novel was said to exaggerate the dangers of drugs, one to exaggerate the hope that drug users could "just say no" and sober up and be mentally healthy again.

Alice Carriere was rich but both of her parents had been just a little too arty and avant-garde in the 1970s. Both were drug-damaged, though little Alice remembered them trying to stick to legal drugs in front of their child. Alice might have shown some damage of her own even before she started experimenting with recreational drugs. 

Too Much Anger Too Many Tears, by Janet Gotkin, was an important book written to warn my generation about the dangers of the psychiatric "medications" used in the 1960s. As Gotkin recalled, she was the typical high school star student who gets into a good college and realizes that, though she is gifted, her gifts are unexceptional. She found this discouraging. She went to a psychiatrist and asked for pills to help her feel better. She kept records of the pills she was given. They did not help her feel better, to put it mildly. Gotkin was born early enough in the twentieth century to find a husband who didn't midn that she'd disqualified herself for any responsible job. Her husband, not her psychiatrist, guided her to the saving insight that what she was feeling was not in fact a mental illness but "plain old ordinary human despair." Gotkin, eighty years old at the time of writing, dedicated the rest of her life to helping women reclaim their right to sanity without these dangerous drugs.

But by the 1990s Too Much Anger seemed outdated. The new psychiatric medications seemed so much safer...

Those who fail to learn form the past are doomed to repeat it and so Everything Nothing Someone is a newer, livelier version, with more sexual titillation and more of the glamour of wealth, of Too Much Anger Too Many Tears. Alice took all the pills her doctors offered, and felt sicker and sicker, and narrates it all with the fascinating insouciance only a very young person with very old money--and a touch of dissociative mental illness--could ever achieve. 

This memoir is not for the squeamish. It contains details of a roundworm infestation in a human (Alice) and septic wounds left by inability to heal from surgery (Jennifer) and other medical horrors, all with that weird, detached voice that reads like a US version of 100 Years of Solitude.  That makes it much more fun to read than Too Much Anger was, but the message is the same. 

Using drugs in hope of destroying a damaged portion of the brain and retraining the brain to use healthier neurons is, at best, a long shot in the dark. People who feel that their minds are falling apart are more likely to reclaim their sanity without drugs. While doctors who hand out pills to help people feel happier, sexier, calmer, or more energetic may have better intentions than people who sell drugs on the street, there are much safer  and more effective ways to feel happier, sexier, calmer, or more energetic.