Rachel Aviv



The highly anticipated debut from the award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv asks how the stories we tell about mental illness shape our deepest sense of who we are

Strangers to Ourselves is a compassionate, courageous and deeply researched look at the ways we talk about and understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on conversations as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, it follows people who have found that psychiatric language has limitations when it comes to explaining who they are, or that a diagnosis, while giving their experience a name, creates a sense of a future life they wish to question or resist.

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 institutionalized at the age of six, she introduces, among others, a mother recovering from psychosis and rebuilding her relationship with her children; 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 cultural perspectives, Aviv opens up fresh ways of thinking about illness and the mind, in a book which is curious, transformative, and above all, profoundly human.

Telling Lives of Mental Illness

Strangers to Ourselves

A collection of reported stories that explore the relationship between mothers and daughters, from the finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for her work in The New Yorker. You Won’t Get Free of It tells the stories of mothers and daughters searching for each other and for themselves. Rachel 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 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 people’s 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 exploration of the competing dynamics of knowing and unknowing, recognition and refusal, that shape our most foundational relationship. Illuminating ineffable registers of experience, Aviv reckons with the way that disowned knowledge forms and deforms families and lives.

Stories of Mothers and Daughters

You Won't Get Free of It

Real-life stories of mothers and daughters – of what we inherit, what we bury and what we, finally, find the courage to say – by the award-winning New Yorker staff writer. 'Beautiful, thoughtful and probing writer' Daisy Johnson You Won’t Get Free of It tells the stories of mothers and daughters searching for each other and for themselves. Aviv explores the complexity of this relationship in seven essays, six originally published in the New Yorker and reconceived for this intimate, revelatory book. Aviv writes about one mother searching for her vanished daughter; another who sacrifices herself for her daughters by working as a nanny for other people’s 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 exploration of the competing dynamics of knowing and unknowing, recognition and refusal, that shape our most foundational relationship. PRAISE FOR STRANGERS TO OURSELVES 'An arresting work of profound empathy and insight' Patrick Radden Keefe 'Combines the poise of Janet Malcolm and the confessional bravery of Joan Didion' Vogue 'Profoundly intelligent' Guardian

You Won’t Get Free of It

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.

Stories of Unsettled Minds

The highly anticipated debut from the acclaimed, award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv compels us to examine how the stories we tell about mental illness shape our sense of who we are. In Strangers to Ourselves, a powerful and gripping debut, Rachel Aviv raises fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. She follows an Indian woman, celebrated as a saint, who lives in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother vying for her children’s forgiveness after recovering from psychosis; a man who devotes his life to seeking revenge upon his psychoanalysts; and an affluent young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to go off her meds because she doesn’t know who she is without them. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv’s exploration is refracted through her own account of living in a hospital ward at the age of six and meeting a fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel—until it no longer does. Aviv asks how the stories we tell about mental disorders shape their course in our lives. Challenging the way we understand and talk about illness, her account is a testament to the porousness and resilience of the mind.

Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

Mavis Gallant

Malcolm Gladwell

Toni Bentley

Alec Wilkinson

Nicholas Schmidle

Oito grandes reportagens sobre crimes da melhor revista jornalística do mundo Fundada pelos jornalistas Harold Ross e Jane Grant em 1925, a New Yorker é uma instituição norte-americana. Desde a sua fundação, a New Yorker se destacou pelo espaço que dava para os novos talentos literários, a sensibilidade fina com que analisava as notícias contemporâneas, e o rigoroso processo de checagem de dados, que até hoje é reconhecido como um dos melhores da imprensa mundial. John Hersey, Hannah Arendt, Dorothy Parker, Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger, John Updike, John Cheever e Jonathan Safran Foer são alguns dos nomes da longa lista de autores consagrados que contribuíram com contos, ensaios críticos, ou reportagens. Um trabalho, porém, é crucial para entender a gênese do livro Os piores crimes da revista New Yorker. Em 1965, quando Truman Capote iniciou a série de artigos na revista que viriam a se tornar o livro "A Sangue Frio", deu-se início a um novo gênero literário; o chamado "crime real", que nas décadas seguintes se consolidaria como um dos mais populares gêneros literários da nossa era. O livro Os piores crimes da revista New Yorker é uma seleção dos melhores artigos publicados nas últimas décadas, tratando de crimes reais, suas consequências, e o que eles podem jogar de luz sobre nossos sistemas legais, nossa sociedade, e nossa humanidade.

Rachel Aviv

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