Rachel Aviv’s first book explores questions of self-knowledge and mental health, subjects she’s previously examined in her award-winning journalism for The New Yorker. Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us is a stunning book, offering sensitive case histories of people whose experiences of mental illness exceed the limits of psychiatric terminology, diagnosis and treatment.

Aviv begins with her own experience as a 6-year-old who stopped eating or drinking, for reasons she can no longer remember. She was eventually diagnosed with anorexia, the youngest child in the U.S. to receive such a diagnosis, and hospitalized for “failure to eat.” At the hospital, she met anorexic girls twice her age and learned to mimic their strategies for losing weight. But which came first: the diagnosis or her symptoms? This misfit between psychiatric terminology and lived experience is the core issue driving Aviv’s subsequent chapters.

Western psychiatry has a long history of ignoring how issues of racial violence and systemic oppression drive mental illness. Aviv’s reporting on Naomi, a woman experiencing psychosis, grounds Naomi’s mental illness in the intergenerational trauma she has experienced as a Black woman, which has been largely ignored by the institutions that have offered her treatment. Western psychiatry, as developed within a white European framework, also fails to account for cultural difference, as in the case of Bapu, a devout Hindu. Bapu’s mystical visions of ecstatic union with Krishna could be reduced to symptoms of schizophrenia, but to categorize them as such would be to ignore how Bapu herself interprets these visions and how they are understood by other Hindu worshippers.

Other chapters show how painfully limited and limiting psychiatric language is when measured against a person’s own sense of themself, a pressing issue in the context of the overmedication of young people. When adolescents are prescribed multiple medications for anxiety and depression, they risk—as in Aviv’s final case history—limiting their self-definition to the diagnoses they have received.

Strangers to Ourselves is a compassionate and necessary exploration of the complex relationship between how we understand ourselves and how psychiatric diagnoses define us.

Our memories of the library, like many other aspects of American life, are often sharply contoured by class. If you’re economically privileged, you may see libraries as places to stock up on the most up-to-date books or as public spaces for cultural events. If you’re economically disadvantaged or homeless, however, the public library may be the primary—or only—location where you can access bathrooms, running water, the internet and a modicum of safety.

Overdue: Reckoning With the Public Library is just what it says in the subtitle: a reckoning. Former school and public librarian Amanda Oliver declares that she isn’t here for the “romanticization” of librarians and libraries. Instead, she wants readers to face the bitter truth. The history of libraries in America, like the history of America itself, is marked by racism and classism—although nowadays, inequality festers more through municipal neglect than outright discrimination. While working at several under-resourced libraries in Washington, D.C., Oliver saw this firsthand. For too long, libraries in America that are “easier to help—and better to showcase” have garnered plenty of energy and money from administrators. Everywhere else, librarians are on their own—and as Oliver vividly documents, they’re drowning.

As a librarian at an elementary school that served primarily low-income students, Oliver quickly learned that her job was as much about performing the work of a social worker, without any social work training, as it was about books. At public libraries, Oliver’s work put her in daily contact with people experiencing homelessness, addiction, severe mental illness and a range of other crises, and she often found herself on the receiving end of verbal abuse and sexual harassment from library patrons. Oliver eventually left the profession, in part due to its toll on her own mental health.

Overdue is not an easy book to read for those of us who love or have romanticized libraries. It requires readers to confront the ways that America and its public institutions are failing low-income communities nationwide—but that’s exactly why it’s essential to read.

Julissa Arce, who charted an unlikely course from banker to writer, doesn’t want to be seen as a model immigrant. Sure, now she has los papeles and owns a home, but she can’t help asking, “What is the real cost of success?” For her, it was not being able to visit her dying father in Mexico because her immigration proceedings were not yet complete. It’s reading textbooks that omit any mention of the roles Latinx people have played in American history. It’s boxes on the U.S. census that erase entire ethnicities and prompt many Latinx people to choose “White” as their race. In You Sound Like a White Girl, Arce argues that now is the moment for Latinx people to reject assimilation and its attendant misconceptions.

These misconceptions, what Arce calls “the lies we’re told,” concern whiteness, English and success, which are all presented as essential to American identity. In the face of this fallacy, Arce wants to recenter Latinx history, identity, culture and language within America. She has thought carefully about not only how assimilation has impacted her—prompting her to modify her name so that her white teachers could pronounce it more easily—but also how such erasures function on a larger scale, causing Latinx folks to miss out on histories that could empower and embolden them. For example, as a girl, Arce wanted to be a cheerleader in Texas. At the time, she was totally unaware of the history of Chicana cheerleaders in Texas or of student protests in 1968, during which students held up signs that read “Brown legs are beautiful.” Without these stories to ground her, she felt isolated among her white teammates. When she went back to her middle school to speak after the publication of her first book, My (Underground) American Dream, she told this story, hoping to speak many such histories back into existence for the next generation.

Ultimately, through these acts of reclamation—of history, language, identity and culture—Arce argues that the very definition of what it means to be an American can shift. On a Christmas trip to Mexico, Arce recalls asking her nephews what they pictured when she said “un americano.” They imagined “a tall white person with blond hair and green or blue eyes.” She replied, “What about me? I am a U.S. citizen. Am I American?” This question, intended to make her nephews think a bit more deeply about their assumptions, is a relevant one for anyone seeking to shed narrow notions of American identity in favor of something truer and more just.