Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us
Channel: New America
Date: 2022-10-26

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 Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are.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.

Join the New America Fellows Program and Future Tense for a conversation with Rachel Aviv and 2018 Emerson Collective Fellow Larissa MacFarquhar for a conversation about Strangers to Ourselves. 

Follow the conversation online using #StrangerstoOurselves and follow us at @NAFellows and @FutureTenseNow.

Speakers:

Rachel Aviv, @RachelAviv
2019 Eric & Wendy Schmidt Fellow, New America
Author, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

Larissa MacFarquhar, @LarissaMacFarqu
2018 Emerson Collective Fellow, New America

Copies of Strangers to Ourselves are available for purchase here through our bookselling partner Solid State Books.

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