6 Books We Can’t Stop Thinking About This Month

Most readers will know Susanna Kaysen’s name through her 1993 memoir, Girl, Interrupted, about her eighteen-month stay in a psychiatric facility, or through that memoir’s 1999 film adaptation starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie. It was the book’s thirtieth anniversary that prompted me to dive into Kaysen’s oeuvre (I interviewed her for VF), which includes one other memoir, an illuminating account of Kaysen’s grappling with debilitating vaginal pain, and three novels. Asa, As I Knew Him, published six years before Girl, Interrupted, is 159 pages of excellence. (At least, that’s the page count in my Vintage Contemporaries edition, which proclaims Kaysen “the voice of a new generation.”) The book opens with a portrait of a man named Asa, who “enters a room with his arms crossed,” whose “shirts are blue or white” and whose “eyes match his shirts.” He is of middle age and height, he loves his dogs. “He thirsts.” The book, we soon learn, is narrated by 30-something-year-old Dinah, his colleague at a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based quarterly magazine, and is prompted by the end of their affair: Who is this person? Dinah muses. The book slips back into Asa’s past, to a story of youthful friendships, summer crushes, and a devastating tragedy. The plot and its characters are seductive, the narrative structure thought-provoking and beguiling, the language funny and sublime—it’s a book for lovers of Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend or Philip Roth’s Zuckerman novels; a book to consume front to back on an early summer day.

Rachel Aviv’s engrossing Strangers to Ourselves (2022, FSG), comprises four substantial portraits of people enduring what Western doctors define as mental illness or disorder: An Indian woman caught between a religious calling and an insistence from Western-inflected psychiatry that she’s suffering from schizophrenia; a white American doctor who falls deeper into his depressive state after checking into a psychiatric institution; a Black mother convinced that she and her children are the target of a government plan to eradicate “undesirables”; a wealthy Greenwich, Connecticut-born woman sent to McLean Hospital—the same facility where Susanna Kaysen had been a patient decades earlier. Their stories are unique in the details, but Aviv connects them with an ongoing interrogation of the ways in which the stories we hear and tell ourselves shape experience, disordered mind or not. She draws not just from extensive interviews, but also the personal writings of her subjects, noting that all “felt compelled to write about their illnesses, even as they realized that the language on offer wasn’t quite right.” (One young woman Aviv interviewed described “her attempt to translate symptoms of psychosis into language: ‘It’s like trying to explain what a bark sounds like to someone who’s never heard of a dog.’”) 

She bookends the four portraits with an account of her own hospitalization for anorexia at the age of six, focusing particularly on her relationship with a girl named Hava, a few years older, who she met there; while Aviv’s stay is short and, by most metrics, successful, Hava’s illness becomes a debilitating, lifelong fact. What factors contribute to the ability of some disordered minds to become “well”? How to grapple with the fact that some so-called disorders spring from environmental truths; America—historically and at present—does have systems in place that oppress Black people, just as it is a country that elevates thinness as an ideal. “Psychiatrists know remarkably little about why some people with mental illnesses recover and why others with the same diagnosis go on to have an illness ‘career,’” she writes. “Answering the question, I think, requires paying more attention to the distance between the psychiatric models that explain illness and the stories through which people find meaning themselves.” This book dwells, brilliantly, in the in-between.