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This as more than a newsletter; it’s a magazine of my work that I publish for you.
All of my writing asks the same question:
What if we questioned society’s wellness formula and created our own?
Join a community of people who want more than what the media feeds us.
The annual subscription ($30/year) gives you
Exclusive access to Cured: The Memoir—The highly anticipated sequel to Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses (HarperCollins), Cured combines memoir and investigative journalism to challenge mental illness narratives
The 🎧 audiobook narration on the Substack app or on Spotify—hear my powerful story in my own voice
My monthly columns and community threads where we consider what society says will make us happy and what really does
Start with a Question, where we question what we believe to be true about being human in today’s fast-paced world
Less of More and More—for those who want a little less in a culture of too much
The full archive of my work
The annual subscription ($30/year) is about the price of one hardcover book a year.
In case you don’t know me, I’m an author at HarperCollins, on the creative writing faculty at Northwestern University, a freelance writer at The New York Times and elsewhere, a certified mental health peer recovery support specialist (PRSS), and a mental health keynote speaker who’s spoken to audiences across the country about recovery from mental illness. I’m also a Substack Growth Strategist and the founder and director of Substack Writers at Work.
Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses (HarperCollins) is a cautionary tale of what can happen when a young person overidentifies with a psychiatric diagnosis and continues to do so into adulthood. An Apple Best Books pick, it was featured on NPR, Oprah Daily, Salon, Forbes, The Los Angeles Times and was hailed in The New York Times as a “fiery manifesto of a memoir.
I write for many publications, including The New York Times, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Time Magazine, and The Paris Review, where I was an advisory editor. I live in Chicago with my two beloved cats, Baby Theo and Sweets. They were instrumental in my recovery. More than anything, I want a t-shirt that says, Ask me about my cats.
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What people are saying:
“Sarah Fay’s artful work is pleasingly unclassifiable—masterfully written, distinctively researched, and deeply humane. I’ll just call it genius.” —Anthony Swofford, International and New York Times bestselling author of Jarhead
“Sarah Fay is a deeply compelling person and a fantastic writer. We were wowed by her talent for bolstering personal stories with takeaways backed up with careful research.” —Apple Best Books Pick, Pathological
“Sarah Fay creates a work of art that entertains as much as it informs. The prose is so electric, incisive, witty, irreverent, devastating, sparkling!” —Porochista Khakpour, award-winning author of Sick
“Sarah Fay shows how our attempts to order the universe and our minds has caused at least as much harm as good.” —DT Max, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of The Family That Couldn’t Sleep
“Sarah Fay’s talent for empathetic, but un-sugarcoated language and her passion for patient-led recovery makes her posts compelling and thought-provoking.” —Neva Kares Talladen, The Other Worldly Dispatch