New York Times Book Review Top 10 Books of the Year

'Captures with subtlety and empathy the honest reality of mental illness' 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...

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.

'Aviv finds language for the most ineffable registers of human experience' Wall Street Journal

'Profoundly intelligent... superbly written portraits' Guardian

A best book of the year in the Los Angeles Times, Time, Washington Post, New Yorker, and Vogue

About the Author
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.

Reviews
A subtle and penetrating investigation into how mental illness is diagnosed ... Aviv is an instinctive storyteller... meticulous, empathic, tirelessly inquisitive. -- Hephzibah Anderson * Observer *
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. * New York Times Book Review *
Profoundly intelligent ... superbly written portraits ... [A] remarkable book. * Guardian *
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. * The Times *
An incredibly researched, empathetic, and moving book. * Lit Hub *
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. * Vogue *
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. * Kirkus Reviews (starred review) *
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. * Wall Street Journal *
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.
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. -- Ben Lerner, author of THE TOPEKA SCHOOL
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" * Observer, *Christmas Gift Guide 2022* *
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 * White Review, *Books of the Year* *
Aviv is a skilled writer... The people at the centre of the book come alive through her prose * Times Literary Supplement *
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 * Dazed Digital *



Book Information
ISBN 9781529111651
Author Rachel Aviv
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Vintage
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 200g
Dimensions(mm) 194mm * 128mm * 22mm