Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us

Rachel Aviv

oct 2022 · Random House

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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

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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.