Rachel Aviv

Rachel Aviv (born 1982) is an American journalist, author, and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her book Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us was published in 2022. Aviv frequently writes about psychiatry. Tablet has referred to Aviv as "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 Foundation nonfiction grant and a 2010 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for Nonfiction. She has investigated Teen Challenge, guardianship abuse, family courts, and the possible innocence of convicted nurse Lucy Letby. She has won a National Magazine Award and a George Polk Award. and was a finalist for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.

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.

Her next book, You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, was released in July 2026 through Fern Press. The book consists of seven essays, six of which were originally published in The New Yorker.