This Has Always Been Possible

Sarah LaBrie talks to Nina St. Pierre about their respective memoirs, “No One Gets to Fall Apart” and “Love Is a Burning Thing.”

By Sarah LaBrieJune 12, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

NINA ST. PIERRE’S memoir, Love Is a Burning Thing (2024), centers on an event that happened well before she was born. When she was a young woman, Nina’s mother attempted to self-immolate as part of a dual suicide pact with her friend. The attempt failed, and in her recovery, Nina’s mother, a lapsed Catholic, discovered Transcendental Meditation, a devotion to mysticism that would shape the rest of her life. Her restless search for spiritual fulfillment defined Nina’s upbringing, taking the family—including Nina’s younger brother—from city to city while masking the symptoms of a lifelong, undiagnosed mental illness. Then, when Nina was a teenager, her mother burned down the family home during a psychotic episode. They all survived—Nina had already moved out, and her mother had the presence of mind to send her younger brother away.

In her book, Nina asks what it means to survive a caregiver who loved her but who also inhabited increasingly untenable realities. I recognized much of my own story in hers. We were both raised by single mothers in what Nina refers to as a “closed system”; their mental states made them highly suspicious of the outside world. Like St. Pierre, I’m interested in the emotional enmeshment inherent in this kind of bond, and the guilt that inevitably results when it all goes sideways. My memoir, No One Gets to Fall Apart (2024), traces the origins of my mother’s psychotic break as well as my fear of what loving her might ultimately do to me.

Nina and I met recently to discuss our books and our families, as well as questions around faith and control, who decides what’s real, and what it means to define yourself after a childhood marked by chaos.

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SARAH LABRIE: I wanted to ask what your relationship to New Age spirituality is now. Do you have any sort of practice, or have you completely rejected it?

NINA ST. PIERRE: When you’re young and you’re being raised in this maelstrom of things, you end up collapsing all the different elements, and belief starts to feel dangerous. It equals falling off the edge of the earth. There were things lodged in me but not articulated—the book helped me process all that. Now I read my horoscope. I’m aware when the eclipse is eclipsing. If I have to have a very serious conversation, I’ll look at the day and ask, “Is there a better time to do this?” I’ve gotten into a little bit of ancestor work. I do new moon ceremonies. I’d say I’m minorly witchy, while always, always staying cynical about the whole industry of New Age spirituality as a commodity or an escape route.

You write about faith and belief and how they’re intertwined with survival. Right before a scene where your mom takes you to a church service where everyone is speaking in tongues, you write:

Young children […] aren’t built to perceive their caretakers—the “system” they rely on—as untrustworthy. If they are neglected or abused or become unsafe, instead of pointing the finger outward, they often internalize and blame themselves. […] When the person we are surviving is also the one who nurtures us, an unbridgeable schism emerges between true and untrue. Between impossibility and necessity.

That really resonated with me. Kids sometimes believe that they have control over the adults in their life. You compare that to how adults use religion to impose order on the world. What beliefs do you remember developing around your mother and how much you could influence her behavior? What do you think about those beliefs now?

I definitely believed my mom’s state was more dependent on my choices than it probably was. I’m not just talking about when I was a child. This went on into my twenties. I mean, I went to Italy and came back, and she burned the house down. If you were raised by a single mother and had that kind of ride-or-die life, there’s no way you don’t feel responsible somehow.

I had a lot of guilt. I felt like I had abandoned her, or chosen my own life over not just her, but also my little brother. After she died, my dad took me to release her funeral flowers in a little ceremony in the city park, and I said, “I should have done more. If I did something different, maybe she would still be here.” And my dad said, “Oh, Neen. If you guys weren’t here, she would have been gone a long time ago.”

I had this moment once where I said to a therapist, “Maybe my mom would have been better off if she’d never had me.” And the therapist said, “I think she was infinitely better off because you were born.” And it was such a relief to hear that. I’d believed for so long everything wrong with her was my fault. Just to consider the idea that maybe that wasn’t true, that maybe I made her life better, mattered so much.

I’m curious about your relationship to selfhood. There’s a paragraph about this in your book that really hit me: “[M]y father spoke in haikus of singularity and oneness. Of merging with the collective. But how the eff would I know who I was if I merged with everyone? As I felt the boundaries of my selfhood threatened, a primal scream let loose. ‘Enough,’ it said.”

What does it mean to have your selfhood encroached on like that? And why do you think you were able to be so fiercely protective of it, even when you were young? I mean, your mom brought you into all kinds of different worlds, but at the revival with everyone speaking in tongues, you said “No. Enough.” How?

That moment on the beach at that revival ceremony was the beginning of a self coming forward that was attached to the material world. That cared about the senses, about what I could see, taste, touch, feel. About being almost violently in my body. Because that was real. I became violently attached to the real.

There had been so many things that I had been exposed to and so many different paths that my mom took me down. If there had been one consistent story, if my mom had stuck with something like Catholicism or Transcendental Meditation, at least there would have been a structure to push against. But there was nothing solid. Just constant movement. That worked for her in a kind of mosaic way, but for me it was destabilizing.

Something inside me knew: If you keep going like this, you’re going to become an unstable person. Survival isn’t always about just, “Do I have food and water?” That was a moment where something prescient in me knew: Your psychological and emotional survival is dependent on being grounded as fuck.

I think one way we survive those kinds of circumstances is to find a different locus of control.

What nuances do you feel are missing in stories or conversations about mental health?

We both tried to write about our moms’ symptoms with a kind of respect, or at least curiosity, right? By asking questions about what was happening and why, rather than saying, “This is what mental illness is, it’s horrible, here’s the name for it, here’s the history.” You’ve said about your mom that you didn’t want to overlay a diagnosis on somebody who hadn’t ever been officially diagnosed, who maybe had a whole other thing going on that wasn’t even diagnosable. I kind of felt like my mother’s diagnosis didn’t matter. Her paperwork says “schizophrenia”—but if you read enough books about schizophrenia, you discover it might not even exist. Psychiatrists are arguing about it all the time.

I wanted to write a book about psychosis that didn’t present it solely as a tragedy, but also as a way of being and existing in the world. I wanted to show how it manifested in my mom while also showing how it might manifest differently in other people.

Freud has an essay, “Constructions in Analysis,” where he writes that all of mankind “has developed delusions which are inaccessible to logical criticism and which contradict reality.” We’re all, to some degree, subject to a collectively agreed-on reality, and some people fall outside of that. Who decides who’s inside it and who’s outside?

I don’t want to downplay the consequences of schizophrenia because if the alternative is living under a bridge or getting addicted to heroin to stop hearing voices, then yes, it needs to be treated if someone wants a healthy life. But it’s not as binary as schizophrenic or sane. That feels fake to me.

It felt like a fine line to tread. I had to be very clear: I’m not equating mysticism with mental illness. I’m also not saying that people should not be medicated and given Western treatment if that serves them, because that’s a part of the danger—it’s what happened to my mother as well.

But often, at the center of my inquiry, was this question of what is possible. Is consensus reality just this shared delusion that we’ve all, in ways conscious or unconscious, agreed upon? For me, those became philosophical questions that I felt responsible for posing in the project because of its nature. At the same time, though, those were not questions that had a grounded daily function in my life, because at some point—maybe increasingly less so, but at some point—those questions had been dangerous for me.

Were there philosophical questions that you felt responsible for taking on in your book?

Before I wrote No One Gets to Fall Apart, I’d been trying to write a novel about the multiverse based on Walter Benjamin and his incomplete philosophical and political text The Arcades Project, which is about Paris and how it exists in many different eras at the same time. You wind up thinking a lot about these things when you’re dealing with somebody who has delusions but whose reality is, nonetheless, incredibly real to them.

There was a line in your book that I underlined where you’re writing about your mom burning down your family home. You write: “It occurred to me this had always been possible. This is what she’d been capable of all along.” I thought it was just a perfect encapsulation of what being face-to-face with a loved one’s delusional mentality makes you realize: reality isn’t fixed, and it might always be just on the verge of falling away. Once you know that, you can’t unknow it. But it can be so isolating because so many people walk around believing reality is fixed and not questioning the darkness that lies beyond.

That’s so well put. I think, to your point, what was required of us as writers taking on a book like this, and committing to it, was that generosity of questioning. Of saying, “Okay, this was your mother’s reality, this was my mother’s reality.” Whether or not we agree with those realities, or whether readers agree, it doesn’t matter. All the labels we want to give it, whether it’s through the lens of philosophy, or psychology, or spirituality, those are … we’re just naming things, but it doesn’t change anything. It does not change the fundamental experience these women were having. That is what’s theirs. And we can only claim to represent our experience of them, or with them.

I think it’s an act of deep love and generosity to say, “Okay, I’m going to try to understand this, and I’m going to present these different possibilities for what could be going on, to the best of my ability,” but their experience is their experience. And on some level, it just is, you know?

I want to ask you about apophenia, the feeling that if you can tap into the music of a thing, into the root, the sacred geometry, the unity of it all, it’ll unfurl before you. It’s a symptom of schizophrenia, but isn’t that also a little bit like creating when you’re in the flow state—chasing the feeling that it’s all right around the corner? Did discovering that phenomenon bring you closer to your mother or her mind in any way?

Apophenia is the word for the sense that everything is connected by an invisible thread, and it’s something I experienced, very strongly, one summer when I was working as a residential adviser for an NYU study abroad program in Paris where the students didn’t actually need much advising. I spent all my time just walking along the Seine from sunrise to sunset, and I started to see the way the trees everywhere looked like the river, which looked like the Métro map, which looked like my veins branching in my wrist, which looked like neurons, which looked like my fingers branching from my palm, which looked like lightning, which looked like the limestone caves underground, and so on.

I was thinking a lot about the multiverse back then because I was trying to write a novel about it, and it just seemed so obvious to me that if everything on the planet branched, then the system the planet was a part of must branch too. And that meant the multiverse was real in some way. But at the same time, I knew this kind of thinking could bend toward the terrifying and that you could get lost in it, and I did, for a long time, get lost in trying to write a novel that encapsulated those thoughts.

But through that obsession, I discovered Adrian Bejan, an engineering professor at Duke who also noticed these shapes and who came up with a name for them, “the constructal law,” and uses them in his work. I wrote so much about this shape and this process that a few people wound up hiring me to write more about it, so it turned out to be a really fruitful obsession for me.

And then a few years later, my mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia. I discovered apophenia was one of the symptoms—that was how I learned the word for what I’d been feeling in Paris—and I remember thinking, There but for the grace of God …

I mean, it’s interesting. The fact that an overactive tendency toward pattern recognition is a symptom of schizophrenia doesn’t change the fact that the world is made up of patterns. And I do wonder if whatever tendency it is that forced me to pursue that pattern obsession so doggedly, even though it was weird and outside my field of expertise, is the same one that led to some of my mother’s obsessive delusions. If the same brain activity just manifested differently in me.

Jennifer Egan had a brother with schizophrenia, and I quote a New Yorker interview in my book where she points out that the only difference between the way she and her brother responded to the voices in their heads—where she became a famous novelist and he suffered from psychosis—was luck. I think about that a lot. How so much of what happens to us, how so much of what shifts the trajectory of our lives, is just dumb luck. And I’m not sure what to do with that information other than just to be grateful, and to be grateful to my mother for the parts of her I inherited, parts that made my current life—which I love—possible, even as they destroyed hers.

The bifurcation of the life we came from and the one we create seems so common in high-achieving artists from dysfunctional backgrounds. It can feel like a choice between betrayal and survival. I’ve been thinking about how different it is to create life in reaction to something instead of molding ourselves after it. What did you take from your mother and what do you continue to strive against?

In terms of what I react against, I think sometimes it’s hard for me to recognize or experience my own emotions, because I used to be so afraid of giving into them completely, the way it seemed she did, or the way it seems schizophrenia can make people do. Like you, it was important to me to always stay conscious of what’s real and what’s not, and as a result, sometimes I think I can be overly analytical and underemotional.

But I also think she made me fearless. It’s not normal to come from the world I come from in Houston and not at least try to become a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant or something safe. And I’m not saying I don’t strive for security—I do—but once upon a time, in a much better economy, I quit a well-paying day job that I absolutely hated because I got waitlisted for Yaddo and I wanted to be able to go if I got in. And it wasn’t like I had money or a backup plan. I didn’t. I just had a single-minded dedication to writing, a tiny bit of savings, and a rent-controlled apartment. And I did eventually get off the waitlist, and eventually I wrote this book. That kind of weird devotion and totally impractical risk-taking and belief that it will pay off definitely came from my mother. She pushed me very hard when I was younger, and she also instilled in me the belief that the only thing that was ever going to stop me from getting what I wanted was me.

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Nina St. Pierre is a queer essayist and culture writer whose work has appeared in Elle, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, Gossamer, Nylon, Outside, Columbia Journal, Bitch, Catapult, and more. She is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Nonfiction Literature. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Rutgers University–Camden.