{"id":17270,"date":"2026-05-29T13:12:59","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T13:12:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/?p=17270"},"modified":"2026-05-29T13:31:29","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T13:31:29","slug":"pulitzer-finalist-mental-illness-recovery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2026\/05\/29\/pulitzer-finalist-mental-illness-recovery\/","title":{"rendered":"A closer look at a Pulitzer finalist story about mental illness and recovery"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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Sign up for the Nieman Storyboard newsletter,<\/em><\/a> delivered every Friday in your inbox.<\/em><\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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***<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Dear Storyboard community:<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Last year, Storyboard contributor Mallary Tenore Tarpley<\/a> took us through her personal story<\/a> of navigating \u201cthe middle place\u201d in illness and recovery \u2014 the place where storytelling often oversimplifies the journey or seeks tidy narratives. Her deeply reported memoir, \u201cSLIP: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery<\/a>,\u201d uses her childhood journals to chronicle her diagnosis and treatment for anorexia following the death of her mother from breast cancer when Tarpley was 11 years old. <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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This week, Tarpley is back with a new story annotation<\/a> about illness and recovery, written by Rachel Aviv of The New Yorker. In \u201cMary Had Schizophrenia and Then Suddenly Didn\u2019t,\u201d<\/a> Aviv tells the story of a woman diagnosed with schizophrenia whose symptoms disappeared 20 years later, after her treatment for cancer. Aviv’s story was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Feature Writing earlier this month, and for Storyboard she shares how she restructured the piece only five days before publication.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The story goes deep into Mary’s life with her daughters, Christine and Angie, as they tried to make sense of their mother’s illness. Aviv quotes from the journal Christine kept as a teenager: \u201cMy mom has erotomanic delusion disorder with a splash of persecutory delusions.\u201d <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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This is key to Aviv’s work: her ability to build trust and connection with her sources, such that they feel comfortable sharing highly personal information like medical records and journal entries. In her New Yorker story \u201cAlice Munro\u2019s Passive Voice,\u201d published in 2024<\/a>, Aviv worked closely with the author\u2019s daughter and included personal letters about suffering sexual abuse by Munro’s partner.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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After they read that piece, \u201cI think [Mary’s daughters] were familiar with my approach, and that helped a lot,\u201d Aviv told Tarpley. \u201cChristine had this archive of childhood materials that she’d been keeping. She jokes that it was like she had been waiting her whole life for a fact checker.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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The result is a nuanced portrait of a life with mental illness, what happens when that illness mysteriously goes away, and a possible breakthrough connected to an autoimmune disorder treatment.  <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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Tarpley tells Storyboard that Aviv\u2019s work provided inspiration for how she wrote about recovery in her own book. “Aviv’s New Yorker story about the Newtown Bee<\/a> [the local newspaper that covered the Sandy Hook school shooting] was the impetus for my work on restorative narrative,\u201d said Tarpley. \u201cThe restorative narrative genre is what led me to then develop the middle place concept.\u201d<\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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For more story annotations featuring Rachel Aviv, check out our Storyboard archive: <\/p>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n \n

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