“LaBrie’s spellbinding prose is a metaphysical experience: cinematic, poetic, philosophical, and wholly stunning,” says Alissa Nutting, author of Made for Love and Tampa. “If psychiatric disability has impacted your life, or if you’ve ever been lonely, or if you enjoy having exceptional writing light up your brain, this book is an essential gift. This memoir will never leave me.” 

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Sarah LaBrie, No One Gets To Fall Apart: A memoir

Sarah LaBrie was in her early thirties when her mother was found on a highway outside Houston, screaming at passing cars and paranoid that she would be murdered by invisible assailants. She was ultimately diagnosed with schizophrenia-and in an instant, the entirety of LaBrie’s childhood came into sharp focus.

In this episode of Black Market Reads: On Health Lissa and Bukata talk with author Sarah LaBrie about her latest work.

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Author LaBrie talks about her family’s distrust of the medical system caused by many things including the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the contributions of Henrietta Lacks taken without consent.

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Tuskegee Experiment: The Infamous Syphilis Study | HISTORY

In order to track the disease’s full progression, researchers provided no effective care as the study’s African American participants experienced severe health problems including blindness, mental impairment-or death.

Henrietta Lacks: science must right a historical wrong

In Henrietta Lacks’s centennial year, researchers must do more to ensure that human cells cannot be taken without consent. In Henrietta Lacks’s centennial year, researchers must do more to ensure that human cells cannot be taken without consent.

Lissa and Sarah discuss the work of psychologist Resmaa Menakem. talking about somatic abolitionism as a living embodied practice and a culture that tempers the body to hold the charge of race.

LISSA: Do you think you’ve learned to temper your body to hold the charges that you’ve had to hold given your experiences?

SARAH: I think about that all the time. I love Resmaa’s book, My Grandmother’s Hands. I read it and re-read it while I was writing this book. Whenever I have a knee-jerk reaction to a way that somebody speaks to me I’m able to pause and remember that book and think, oh, this is embedded in our culture.

This is not just a me and that person thing. This is a culture wide, society wide, generational, inherited thing and we’re all embedded in this network. And something I think about a lot that also runs underneath No One Gets to Fall Apart, even though I don’t think I directly quote her. It’s Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy.

And because those books are very much in conversation with each other, if you can get in tune with your own emotional understanding of how you fit into your immediate community, you can change things like you change yourself and you change the world. It’s all about embodiment, right?”

Resmaa was a guest on Black Market Reads. Listen here

Our production team for this episode includes co producers/ Lissa Jones and Edie French, co-host/Bukata Hayes, technical director/Paul Auguston, The Voice/Yo Derek, and our artist of inspiration/Ta-coumba T. Aiken. We thank Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota for supporting On Health focusing on the intersection of health, race, and culture.

Black Market Reads: On Health is a collaboration with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, as part of Blue Cross’ long-term commitment to improving the health of Minnesota communities and ensuring that all people have opportunities to live the healthiest lives possible.