Welcome to my online home!
This is my website and my Substack, which is basically an ever-growing anthology of my work.
All my writing in some way questions what society says will make us happy and discover what actually does. Each year, I do something a little different (my version of Taylor Swift’s eras).
As a paid subscriber, you receive
Access to my second memoir Cured—a year-long account of my recovery from serious mental illness and investigation into the history of mental health recovery
The 🎧 audiobook narration of Cured on the Substack app or Spotify
My monthly column delivered to your inbox
This year it’s Less of More and More—for those who want a little less in a culture of too much
The full anthology of my work, including
Start with a Question, where we question what we believe to be true about being human in today’s fast-paced world
Exclusive interviews with experts on mental health recovery—including Tom Insel (former head of the NIMH) and Dr. Chyrell Bellamy (Director of Yale's Program for Recovery and Community Health)
Amazing interviews with others who’ve recovered from mental illness
Thank you for supporting my work. As a writer, I need readers who will help me continue to bring my writing to the world.
Your annual support ($30) is about the price of a hardcover book each 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.
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
“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