Strangers to Ourselves

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

An incredibly researched, empathetic, and moving book.

Lit Hub

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

Guardian

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

Hephzibah Anderson, Observer

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

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

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

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

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