Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us

Strangers to Ourselves

New York Times Book Review Top 10 Books of the Year 
 
&lsquo;Captures with subtlety and empathy the honest reality of mental illness&rsquo; The Times 
 
There are stories that save us, and stories that trap us, and in the midst of an illness it can be very hard to know which is which&hellip; 
 
Strangers to Ourselves shares the experiences of five people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. It asks, do the stories we tell around mental illness affect its course, its outcomes, even our identities? 
 
Drawing on in-depth reporting, written testimonies and formative events in her own childhood, award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv offers a subtle, compassionate, revelatory account of how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. 
 
&lsquo;Aviv finds language for the most ineffable registers of human experience&rsquo; Wall Street Journal 
 
&lsquo;Profoundly intelligent&hellip; superbly written portraits&rsquo; Guardian 
 
A best book of the year in the Los Angeles Times, Time, Washington Post, New Yorker, and Vogue

A subtle and penetrating investigation into how mental illness is diagnosed ... Aviv is an instinctive storyteller... meticulous, empathic, tirelessly inquisitive.

So attuned to subtlety and complexity... a book-length demonstration of Aviv's extraordinary ability to hold space for the "uncertainty, mysteries and doubt" of others.

Profoundly intelligent ... superbly written portraits ... [A] remarkable book.

Captures with subtlety and empathy the honest reality of mental illness... a human chronicle that is intimate and unpredictable... Instead of demonizing disorders of the mind, Aviv seeks to understand their causes.

An incredibly researched, empathetic, and moving book.

Combines the poise of Janet Malcolm and the confessional bravery of Joan Didion ... Through half a dozen vivid case studies - one being the story of her own hospitalization at age six - Aviv unravels medical diagnoses and demonstrates how societal narratives around illness take hold. The result is fascinating and empathetic.

Aviv applies her signature conscientiousness and probing intellect to every section of this eye-opening book ... A moving, meticulously researched, elegantly constructed work of nonfiction.

In writing against the limits of psychiatric narratives, into the space where language has failed, Aviv paradoxically finds language for the most ineffable registers of human experience.

Writing with uncanny empathy and integrity ... Strangers to Ourselves is a work of landmark reporting that is truly heartbreaking and astonishing.

Cathy Park Hong, author of MINOR FEELINGS: An Asian American Reckoning

A groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting exploration of the relationship between diagnosis and identity. This is the kind of book that can make your life flash before your eyes, glittering with new insights and a sense of unguessed possibilities.

Elif Batuman, author of EITHER/OR and THE IDIOT

Relentlessly faithful to complexity, absolutely unsettling in all the best and most important ways ... Aviv explores her subjects not as diagnoses but as fully dimensional characters.

Leslie Jamison, author of MAKE IT SCREAM, MAKE IT BURN

In this penetrating, landmark book, Rachel Aviv investigates what she calls the 'psychic hinterlands,' drawing on her customary vivid reporting and her own extraordinary personal story to pose unsettling questions about the ways in which we reckon with mental illness ... Aviv has created an arresting work of profound empathy and insight.

Patrick Radden Keefe, author of SAY NOTHING and EMPIRE OF PAIN

Aviv writes with an unpredictable mixture of intimacy and distance, exploring how psychiatric language often alters what it names ... I admire her rigor and eloquence but also her restraint - she makes vivid experiences we can't explain.

Master prose stylist Rachel Aviv quietly explodes our neat narratives as she rescues the meanings of lives formed in extremity, including her own. Breaking away from labels that have the power to create the futures they foretell, her case histories are kaleidoscopic, filled with sudden radiance and uncomfortable discontinuities ... Brilliant.

George Makari, MD, author of OF FEAR AND STRANGERS: A History of Xenophobia, director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College

I was blown away...a radically human book that lead me not to answers, but to better questions, about the infinite contingencies of mental "health"

Strangers to Ourselves was revelatory to me in its empathetic, sprawling unraveling of how mental illness forms our identities... It's the best kind of reported nonfiction, an entire book that feels like the best New Yorker piece you've ever read

Aviv is a skilled writer... The people at the centre of the book come alive through her prose

This is a really affecting book, and one that anyone with even the faintest interest in mental health should read... meticulous, moving portraits of people, from all walks of life

Rachel Aviv is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes about medicine, education, criminal justice, and other subjects. In 2022, she won a National Magazine Award for Profile Writing. A 2019 national fellow at New America, she received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to support her work on Strangers to Ourselves. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

There are stories that save us, and stories that trap us, and in the midst of an illness it can be very hard to know which is which&hellip; 
 
Strangers to Ourselves shares the experiences of five people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. It asks, do the stories we tell around mental illness affect its course, its outcomes, even our identities? 
 
Drawing on in-depth reporting, written testimonies and formative events in her own childhood, award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv offers a subtle, compassionate, revelatory account of how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress.

Rachel Aviv

I admire her rigor and eloquence but also her restraint - she makes vivid experiences we can't explain

Janet Malcolm's successor at the New Yorker

Stories of Mothers and Daughters

You Won't Get Free Of It tells the stories of mothers and daughters searching for each other (and for themselves). With uncanny depth of perception, Aviv explores the complexity of this relationship in seven essays, six originally published in the New Yorker and reconceived for this intimate, revelatory book. 'I wrote some of these stories feeling, existentially, like a daughter, and now I have returned to them with a different identification,' Aviv writes. 'It was as if I had failed to see the drama that was on the mother’s side, too – her particular longings and humiliations and needs.' 
 
Aviv writes about one mother searching for her vanished daughter; another who sacrifices herself for her daughters by working as a nanny for other parents’ children. In the final story, a daughter’s traumatic experience is erased by her family, only to be recast by her mother – the writer Alice Munro – in stories celebrated around the world. You Won't Get Free Of It is an astonishing investigation of the competing dynamics of knowing and unknowing, recognition and refusal, that shape our most foundational relationship. Illuminating ineffable registers of human experience, Aviv asks piercing questions about how disowned knowledge forms and deforms families and lives.

Rachel Aviv

Praise for You Won’t Get Free of It

Aviv is an instinctive storyteller

I admire her rigor and eloquence but also her restraint - she makes vivid experiences we can't explain

Janet Malcolm's successor at the New Yorker

Aviv is an instinctive storyteller

I admire her rigor and eloquence but also her restraint - she makes vivid experiences we can't explain

Janet Malcolm's successor at the New Yorker

Aviv is an instinctive storyteller

I admire her rigor and eloquence but also her restraint - she makes vivid experiences we can't explain

Janet Malcolm's successor at the New Yorker

Books by Rachel Aviv

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