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Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us
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68
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
63/100Critics
74/100Scholars
Author:
Rachel Aviv
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date:
September 13, 2022
Aviv raises fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are.
What The Reviewers Say
... like so many of the stories in this intimate and revelatory book, the truth of it is real but incomplete.
... written with an astonishing amount of attention and care.
Stands out by virtue of how successful she is in the attempt. In fact at moments it feels quite far from the fray, perhaps because...her pieces, even her sentences, tend to conclude ambivalently, and are driven throughout by a curiosity that resists its own moral and rhetorical instincts, forging narrative ones instead.
One of the pleasures of this book is its resistance to a clear and comforting verdict, its desire to dwell in unknowing. At every step, Aviv is nuanced and perceptive, probing cultural differences and alert to ambiguity, always filling in the fine-grain details. Extracting a remarkable amount of information from archival material as well as living interview subjects, she brings all of these people to life, even the two whom she never met. I zipped through each essay—propelled by curiosity—yet needed to take breaks between them, both to recover from the intensity of the human experience described and to sit with the implications of the argument Aviv is building, which suggests that it may be more harmful than helpful to see yourself the way doctors see you.
