Rachel Aviv – författare

New York Times Book Review Top 10 Books of the Year‘Captures with subtlety and empathy the honest reality of mental illness’ The TimesThere are stories that save us, and stories that trap us, and in the midst of an illness it can be very hard to know which is which…Strangers to Ourselves shares the experiences of five people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. It asks, do the stories we tell around mental illness affect its course, its outcomes, even our identities?Drawing on in-depth reporting, written testimonies and formative events in her own childhood, award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv offers a subtle, compassionate, revelatory account of how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress.‘Aviv finds language for the most ineffable registers of human experience’ Wall Street Journal‘Profoundly intelligent… superbly written portraits’ GuardianA best book of the year in the Los Angeles Times, Time, Washington Post, New Yorker, and Vogue

A collection of reported stories that explore the relationship between mothers and daughters by the Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Strangers to OurselvesYou Won't Get Free Of It tells the stories of mothers and daughters searching for each other (and for themselves). With uncanny depth of perception, Aviv explores the complexity of this relationship in seven essays, six originally published in the New Yorker and reconceived for this intimate, revelatory book. 'I wrote some of these stories feeling, existentially, like a daughter, and now I have returned to them with a different identification,' Aviv writes. 'It was as if I had failed to see the drama that was on the mother’s side, too – her particular longings and humiliations and needs.'Aviv writes about one mother searching for her vanished daughter; another who sacrifices herself for her daughters by working as a nanny for other parents’ children. In the final story, a daughter’s traumatic experience is erased by her family, only to be recast by her mother – the writer Alice Munro – in stories celebrated around the world. You Won't Get Free Of It is an astonishing investigation of the competing dynamics of knowing and unknowing, recognition and refusal, that shape our most foundational relationship. Illuminating ineffable registers of human experience, Aviv asks piercing questions about how disowned knowledge forms and deforms families and lives.