Rachel Aviv



Rachel Aviv is a staff writer at The New Yorker who wrote the book Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us in 2022. She frequently writes about psychiatry, and Tablet called her "Janet Malcolm’s successor".

Early life
Aviv was raised in Eastern Michigan. Her parents are divorced. When she was six, she was admitted to the Children's Hospital of Michigan where she received six weeks of treatment for anorexia nervosa. She writes about the experience in the first chapter of her book Strangers to Ourselves. She was thought to be the youngest anorexia patient in the country. Her symptoms subsided after several months.

She attended the private school Cranbrook-Kingswood, where she was co-captain of the girls' tennis team. She graduated from Brown University in 2004.

Career
Aviv won a 2020 Whiting Award in creative non-fiction and a 2010 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. She has investigated Teen Challenge, guardianship abuse, family courts, and the possible innocence of convicted serial murderer and British neonatal nurse, Lucy Letby.

In 2022, her book Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Strangers to Ourselves was selected for The New York Times's "10 Best Books of 2022" list. The book was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.