???? UNDER THE LAMPLIGHT-

Delving into mental illness: When she was 6 years old, Rachel Aviv refused to eat. Her family had observed the fast for Yom Kippur a week prior, where she was introduced to the concept of fasting. She had to be checked into the anorexia unit of the Children’s Hospital of Michigan, making her case the earliest recorded onset of the disease in the US. In her debut novel Rachel Aviv describes her brief stint with anorexia, as she promptly began eating again and was checked out of the hospital two weeks later. In her book, Strangers to Ourselves — named one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2022— Aviv questions “whatever basic feelings existed in me before they were called anorexia” and how the diagnosis that doctors gave her despite not knowing why she refused to eat came to define her experience in terms other than her own.

Aviv explores four other people’s experiences with mental health: Naomi, whose experiences with racism seeped into her psyche, leading her to believe she was being persecuted by the government and eventually throwing her two one-year-olds into a river. She is currently behind bars for second-degree murder. Then there’s Ray, who sued a mental facility that relies on the psychoanalytic method for failing to improve his condition; Laura, a Harvard student and varsity squash player that has been taking mind-altering substances since school and is not sure who she is without them; and Bapu, a mother who left her family to live life as a mystic.