Strangers to Ourselves

For years, I have devoured Rachel Aviv’s nuanced New Yorker features on challenging topics like brain death, the “troubled teen” industry, and the mutability of memory. Her first book is just as gripping and subtle in its exploration of how psychiatric explanations of behavior can both limit and fail to capture who we are. Starting with her own story of being hospitalized for anorexia at age 6, Aviv explores the “psychic hinterlands,” profiling how five others journeyed through “the outer edges of human experience.” This deeply empathetic book raises probing questions about our psychiatric system and the very nature of self-identity.

— Kristen Martin, writer and book critic