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Rachel Aviv: Why It’s Difficult to Trust Your Own Experiences of Mental Illness
This week on The Maris Review, Rachel Aviv joins Maris Kreizman to discuss her new book, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, out now from Farrar, Straus & Giroux....
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When Your OCD Therapy is Also a Treatment for Writers’ Block
Between subway stops on the F train, on my way to see a psychopharmacologist for a headache I’d had for six months, I received another rejection from another agent for yet another draft of my book...
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Exploring Spaces Between Experiences and Stories: Rachel Aviv and Chloé...
When New Yorker writer and author Rachel Aviv was 6, she stopped eating and drinking. In the prologue to Strangers to Ourselves, her first book, Rachel details being hospitalized and assigned a...
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Unravel With Me: Nora McInerny Reflects on an Anxious Life
My favorite category of YouTube video is a Get Ready With Me, where a young person will train a camera on their face during their morning routine, narrating their actions and releasing their inner...
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Lucinda Williams Recalls the Turbulence of Growing Up With a Sick Mother
In the summer my father would drink gin and tonics. When I was a kid, he would say, “Honey, can you go make me a drink?” I knew how to pour gin into a shot glass and into the cocktail glass with ice...
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What’s Unreal is Real: Alicia Elliott on the Tired Trope of Madness in Fiction
Tell me if you’ve heard this twist ending before. Something troubling is happening to the protagonist, causing them to question everyone around them. Maybe she seems to uncover a nefarious plot against...
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Writing Away the Angel in My Bedroom: On OCD
The angel had been with me for nearly four decades, and it was my fault he was gone. I was 36 when I started sharing the secret of my lifelong history with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) beyond my...
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The Journey of a Madwoman: Between Facts, Memory, and a Fractured Self
I started with a walk. The walk would lead me into the past. It took me to a hospital. A hospital that was no longer a hospital. That was the idea. I would describe the hospital, my home. If I could...
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Beauty and Terror: On Understanding and Accepting a Schizophrenic Mother
I was twelve. It was 1993 and we were in far rural northern California in a town called Weed that looked about like it sounded. It was winter, I think, which in 1993, still meant blizzards, and dirty...
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What the Timelessness of Modern Malaise Reveals About the Human Condition
This article, “Collective Neuroses,” was published in the Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift in 1955,* when Viktor E. Frankl was the head of the Neurological Department of the General Policlinic in...
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