Strangers to Ourselves Audiobook By Rachel Aviv cover art

Strangers to Ourselves

Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us

Preview
Try for $0.00
Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Strangers to Ourselves

By: Rachel Aviv
Narrated by: Andi Arndt
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $18.88

Buy for $18.88

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

Brouhgt to you by Penguin.

The highly anticipated debut from the award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv is a ground-breaking exploration of illness and the mind.

Strangers to Ourselves is a compassionate, courageous and riveting look at the ways we talk about and understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on unpublished journals and letters, along with deep reporting, it follows people who feel as if they have reached the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. Their diagnosis, while giving their experiences a name, also shapes their sense of what their future may look like—and their identities, too.

Rachel Aviv is known for her radical empathy: she excels at seeing the world through the eyes of her fellow human beings. Writing first about her own experience of being on an anorexia ward at the age of six, she introduces, among others, a fiercely intelligent mother recovering from incarceration and psychosis; a woman who lives in healing temples in Kerala, where she is celebrated as a saint; and a young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to stop her medication because she doesn't know who she is without it.

Through startling connections, intimate testimonies, and diverse social and cultural perspectives, Aviv opens up fresh ways of thinking about illness and the mind, in a book which is curious, transformative, and above all, deeply human.

©2022 Rachel Aviv (P)2022 Penguin Audio
Mental Health Personality Disorders Psychology Psychology & Mental Health
adbl_web_global_use_to_activate_T1_webcro805_stickypopup
All stars
Most relevant  
Outstanding exploration of a variety of types of mental illness. Beautifully written and narrated. Highly recommended.

Fascinating

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.