Author Guide · Lisanne Swart
Books Written by Rachel Aviv
Rachel Aviv is a New Yorker staff writer whose subject, across two decades of reporting, has been the point where psychiatric explanation runs out — the moment a diagnosis stops accounting for a person’s actual experience. She reports with a patience rare in journalism about mental illness: no tidy verdicts, no easy villain, just careful attention to how people narrate their own crises, and how those narratives shape what happens next.
By Lisanne Swart · 2 books · Nonfiction · Psychology · Updated August 2026
Quick answer
Rachel Aviv has written two books: Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us (2022), a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters (2026). Start with Strangers to Ourselves — it’s her defining work and a New York Times bestseller.
Key facts
- Role: Staff writer, The New Yorker, since 2013
- Books written: 2, published 2022 and 2026
- Awards: George Polk Award, National Magazine Award, Whiting Award (2020); Pulitzer Prize finalist for Feature Writing
- Core subject: Mental illness, psychiatric diagnosis, and the limits of clinical explanation
- Background: Brown University; began writing for The New Yorker in 2011
Why trust this list: Every book below is one I’ve read in full. Curated by Lisanne Swart.
In this guide
Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us
Aviv follows the lives of people — including herself, briefly hospitalized for anorexia at age six — who have hit the limits of what a psychiatric diagnosis can explain about who they are. Drawing on unpublished journals and years of reporting, she asks whether the stories we’re given about our own minds shape the course of our illness as much as the illness itself does.
A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and New York Times bestseller, and the book that established her as, in Tablet’s words, Janet Malcolm’s successor. Patient, morally serious, and never satisfied with an easy diagnosis-shaped answer.
You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters
Seven reported essays, six expanded from pieces originally published in The New Yorker, examining the tangled, often unequal relationship between mothers and daughters — a mother searching for her vanished daughter, a nanny sacrificing herself for her own children while raising someone else’s, and, in the closing essay, the daughter of Nobel laureate Alice Munro, whose trauma was recast in her mother’s own celebrated fiction.
A New York Times bestseller and Editors’ Choice, published four years after Strangers to Ourselves. Same forensic patience, applied to a relationship few writers examine this unsentimentally.
