I feel like readers have their own life experience that they can map onto whatever I am saying. ![]() I want to leave it as if a reader feels like he or she has been the one to reach a conclusion, and not that I have sort of fed them a conclusion. What I really want to do is lay out facts and observations in such a way that I feel like a reader can have a certain impressionistic understanding of the way I’m seeing it, but I still want there to be something that the reader is sort of struggling with. RACHEL AVIV: If anything, I have to consciously work to do the opposite, which is to make an argument. Do you consciously work to not let your personal opinion propel the narrative? She helps readers understand the complex humanity of people who may otherwise be dismissed, seeing past labels and preconceptions so we can connect on a deeper level.Īviv spoke to Shondaland about the challenges of reporting on sensitive topics, her thoughts about modern psychiatry, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of who we are.ĭINA GACHMAN: Your writing, whether it’s this book or any of your New Yorker pieces, never makes it feel like you’re trying to teach a lesson or guide the reader too much in any one direction. Known for bringing empathy and an uncanny depth of perception to her reporting on those who exist in the margins, Aviv shines a light on stories of abuse, neglect, mental disorders, and social injustice. It’s the story of Ray, Bapu, Naomi, Laura, Hava, and the millions of others existing in “the psychic hinterlands.” Aviv’s childhood experience inside that institution informs her understanding of mental illness, selfhood, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of who we are. For years, the experience left Aviv wondering how two people, diagnosed with the same disorder, could continue through life on such different paths. With Strangers to Ourselves, Aviv weaves her own story into the narrative, giving us a glimpse into the time she spent in a psychiatric institution, at the age of 6, for an eating disorder. And then there’s Hava, a young woman who has struggled her entire life with eating disorders and mental distress, and who becomes a sort of upside-down reflection of the author herself. And after years of succumbing to the pressures of upper-class Connecticut society, Laura, a Harvard student who was “excellent at everything,” eventually quits the psychiatric medications she’s relied upon, because after so many years of being treated for mental illness, she feels she doesn’t know who she is. ![]() Naomi, a Black woman in America, leaps into the Mississippi River from Saint Paul’s Wabasha Street Bridge on the Fourth of July with her 14-month-old twins because she believes government operatives are after her family. ![]() Bapu is a wife and mother in India who leaves her family to pursue what she believes to be a mystical quest. ![]() There’s Ray, a renowned physician who fought to discredit the psychiatric institution that treated him for depression, and who spent years writing an unpublished memoir about his life. Through a mix of narrative reporting, personal journals, and psychiatric records, each chapter illuminates the struggles of a different person existing in what Aviv calls “the psychic hinterlands, the outer edges of human experience, where language tends to fail.” What if the story of your life, as you see it, veers wildly from the narrative placed upon you by others - by society, institutions, family members, or psychiatrists? That question propels each chapter in award-winning New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv’s first book, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us.
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