IS EVERYBODY CRAZY? –

Sept. 23, 2022 – It’s a startling passage in the prologue of “Strangers to Ourselves,” but like so many of the stories in this intimate and revelatory book, the truth of it is real but incomplete. As an adult, having written a number of stories about people in extremis for The New Yorker, Aviv has come to “question whatever basic feelings existed in me before they were called anorexia.” Her medical records failed to present a “coherent picture” of why she stopped eating and drinking, but that didn’t stop the doctors from issuing diagnostic proclamations. “The original experience couldn’t be captured or understood on its own terms,” she writes, “and gradually became something that wasn’t entirely of our own making.” We learn about these people one by one, with a chapter for each, so that Aviv can recount their lives in detail and therefore in full. She interviews doctors, friends and survivors; she reads her subjects’ journals in order to get a grasp on how they explained themselves to themselves. Aside from her candid reflections in the prologue and the epilogue, Aviv mostly hangs back, even though her own experience primes us — as maybe it primed her — to be alert to how stories can clarify as well as distort the mental distress that a person is going through.

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