An Interview with Rachel Aviv

“There are stories that save us, and stories that trap us,” writes Rachel Aviv, “and in the midst of an illness it can be very hard to know which is which.” In her first book, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us (Anchor Canada), Aviv, an award-winning investigative journalist, turns her careful focus on mental illness: stories and storytellers, traps and reprieves. With chastening facility, Aviv shows how these stories both mirror and are shaped by systems of race, class, gender, generation, and context. But it is chiefly and essentially about six people, all of whom are represented with startling clarity.