PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Rachel Aviv is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes about medicine, education, criminal justice, and other subjects. In 2022, she won a National Magazine Award for Profile Writing. A 2019 national fellow at New America, she received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to support her work on Strangers to Ourselves. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Aviv writes with an unpredictable mixture of intimacy and distance, exploring how psychiatric language often alters what it names. She has assembled a remarkable archive of unpublished materials - memoirs, poems, journals (including her own) - that offers a visceral counterpoint to the official languages of institutions and expertise. I admire her rigor and eloquence but also her restraint - she makes vivid experiences we can't explain. -- Ben Lerner, author of THE TOPEKA SCHOOL Writing with uncanny empathy and integrity, Rachel Aviv illuminates the ways that culture shapes our perceptions of mental illness and who is deserving of care. Strangers to Ourselves is a work of landmark reporting that is truly heartbreaking and astonishing. -- Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning A groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting exploration of the relationship between diagnosis and identity. This is the kind of book that can make your life flash before your eyes, glittering with new insights and a sense of unguessed possibilities. -- Elif Batuman, author of Either/Or and The Idiot Perceptive and intelligent . . . Aviv applies her signature conscientiousness and probing intellect to every section of this eye-opening book. Her profiles are memorable and empathetic . . . Aviv treats her subjects with both scholarly interest and genuine compassion . . . A moving, meticulously researched, elegantly constructed work of nonfiction. * Kirkus Reviews (starred review) *
