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

Real-life stories of mothers and daughters – of what we inherit, what we bury and what we, finally, find the courage to say – by the award-winning New Yorker staff writer.'Beautiful, thoughtful and probing writer' Daisy JohnsonYou Won’t Get Free of It tells the stories of mothers and daughters searching for each other and for themselves. Aviv explores the complexity of this relationship in seven essays, six originally published in the New Yorker and reconceived for this intimate, revelatory book.Aviv writes about one mother searching for her vanished daughter; another who sacrifices herself for her daughters by working as a nanny for other people’s 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 exploration of the competing dynamics of knowing and unknowing, recognition and refusal, that shape our most foundational relationship.PRAISE FOR STRANGERS TO OURSELVES'An arresting work of profound empathy and insight' Patrick Radden Keefe'Combines the poise of Janet Malcolm and the confessional bravery of Joan Didion' Vogue'Profoundly intelligent' Guardian