Strangers to Ourselves
Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us
Published on 20. October 2022
Book
Hardback
288 pages
978-1-78730-168-9 (ISBN)
Description
The highly anticipated debut from the award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv is a ground-breaking exploration of illness and the mind
Strangers to Ourselves is a compassionate, courageous and riveting look at the ways we talk about and understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on unpublished journals and letters, along with deep reporting, it follows people who feel as if they have reached the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. Their diagnosis, while giving their experiences a name, also shapes their sense of what their future may look like-and their identities, too.
Rachel Aviv is known for her radical empathy: she excels at seeing the world through the eyes of her fellow human beings. Writing first about her own experience of being on an anorexia ward at the age of six, she introduces, among others, a fiercely intelligent mother recovering from incarceration and psychosis; a woman who lives in healing temples in Kerala, where she is celebrated as a saint; and a young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to stop her medication because she doesn't know who she is without it.
Through startling connections, intimate testimonies, and diverse social and cultural perspectives, Aviv opens up fresh ways of thinking about illness and the mind, in a book which is curious, transformative, and above all, deeply human.
Strangers to Ourselves is a compassionate, courageous and riveting look at the ways we talk about and understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on unpublished journals and letters, along with deep reporting, it follows people who feel as if they have reached the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. Their diagnosis, while giving their experiences a name, also shapes their sense of what their future may look like-and their identities, too.
Rachel Aviv is known for her radical empathy: she excels at seeing the world through the eyes of her fellow human beings. Writing first about her own experience of being on an anorexia ward at the age of six, she introduces, among others, a fiercely intelligent mother recovering from incarceration and psychosis; a woman who lives in healing temples in Kerala, where she is celebrated as a saint; and a young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to stop her medication because she doesn't know who she is without it.
Through startling connections, intimate testimonies, and diverse social and cultural perspectives, Aviv opens up fresh ways of thinking about illness and the mind, in a book which is curious, transformative, and above all, deeply human.
Reviews / Votes
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 *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 162 mm
Thickness: 28 mm
Weight
499 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78730-168-9 (9781787301689)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
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.