Story

By organizing Strangers to Ourselves into six sections, each tracing a distinct individual’s personal narrative, the author explores the ways in which story shapes identity. She introduces this thematic notion within the pages of her prologue “Rachel.” In this opening section of the text, Aviv centralizes her own story, particularly tracing her experience with anorexia nervosa, and the ways in which this diagnosis failed to define her life. In the latter passages of the section, Aviv asserts that although she “was ‘recruited’ for anorexia,” the illness “never became a ‘career,’ It didn't provide the language with which I came to understand myself” (21). The same was true for Bapu, Aviv discovers in the pages of the chapter “Bapu.” “Psychiatry,” she argues by way of Bapu’s response to her diagnosis with schizophrenia, “has a kind of double-edged quality, offering a story that can save a person but that...