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STRANGERS TO OURSELVES by Rachel Aviv

Submitted by mcutler on Fri, 2022-08-19 16:19
Posted on August 19, 2022 in
STRANGERS TO OURSELVES by Rachel Aviv
Rachel Aviv’s highly anticipated debut STRANGERS TO OURSELVES continues to be lauded ahead of its publication. BookPage featured the book on their Fall 2022 Preview, writing: “Rachel Aviv’s first book explores questions of self-knowledge and mental health, subjects she’s previously examined in her award-winning journalism for The New Yorker. STRANGERS TO OURSELVES offers sensitive case histories of people whose experiences of mental illness exceed the limits of psychiatric terminology, diagnosis and treatment—including the author’s own experience of being the youngest child in the U.S. to receive a diagnosis of anorexia. After being hospitalized for a failure to eat or drink, she met anorexic girls twice her age and learned to mimic their strategies for losing weight. But which came first: the diagnosis or her symptoms? This contradiction between psychiatric terminology and lived experience is the core issue driving Aviv’s book, which also examines Western psychiatry’s long history of ignoring the link between racial violence and mental illness. It’s a sharp, compassionate and necessary investigation, not to be missed.” STRANGERS TO OURSELVES was also featured on most-anticipated lists from Goodreads and Kirkus. Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish the book on September 13, 2022.