Rachel Aviv on the Complex Bonds Between Mothers and Daughters

In her new essay collection You Won’t Get Free of It, Rachel Aviv reworks her award-winning journalism for The New Yorker to focus on the familial relationship that “seems to defy a fixed point of view”

Rachel Aviv’s new book, You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, makes a compelling case for rifling through a journalist's archive and digging up real-life past events that have long faded into obscurity. After becoming a mother, Aviv – an award-winning journalist and staff writer at The New Yorker since 2013 – cherrypicked six pieces originally published in the magazine, reworking them to focus on the relationships between mothers and daughters at their centre. “The novelist Yiyun Li writes that ‘the essence of growing up is to play hide and seek with one’s mother successfully,’” writes Aviv in the book’s preface. “I wrote some of these stories feeling, existentially, like a daughter, and now I have returned to them with a different identification. It was as if I had failed to see the drama on the mother’s side, too – her particular longings and humiliations and needs.” 

In her work as a journalist at The New Yorker, Aviv tends to focus on stories of mental disorder, crisis and distress, having reported on Gisèle Pelicot’s rape trial, Lucy Letby – a neonatal nurse who may have been wrongfully convicted of murder – and the man wrongfully convicted of raping Alice Sebold, the author of The Lovely Bones. Her first book, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us (2022), attempted to understand the conflicting stories we tell ourselves about psychological distress, using the real-life stories of five people. Aviv has a taste for the macabre, although the stories she tells never feel sensationalist; she writes with remarkable compassion and nuance about her subjects, getting to the root of why people act the way they do. Her journalism is more akin to narrative nonfiction, a genre pioneered by Truman Capote in the 1960s, and more recently made popular again, partly thanks to Patrick Radden Keefe. Aviv’s stories, however, are less machismo; she tells real-life stories about women both famous and ordinary, with no obvious heroes or villains. 

You Won’t Get Free of It opens with a haunting story about Hannah Upp, a young woman who goes missing for days at a time as a result of dissociative fugue, “a rare condition in which people lose access to their personal identity, occasionally adopting a new one, and may abruptly embark on long journeys.” What follows are a group of uncanny stories that often feel stranger than fiction; one focuses on a Filipino woman who sacrifices herself for her daughters by working as a nanny for other parents’ children in New York; another in which a woman leaves a psychiatric hospital and squats in an empty farmhouse, subsisting on apples for months while “awaiting further instructions from God.” In the book’s epic final story, Aviv revists her piece on the Canadian author Alice Munro and her daughter’s experience trying to break the silence surrounding her sexual abuse at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend, Gerald Fremlin. “I’ve always been drawn to stories in which the perspective feels unstable,” Aviv writes. “The mother-daughter relationship, perhaps more than any other, seems to defy a fixed point of view.” 

Here, Aviv talks about how motherhood changed her writing, what makes for a compelling story and her advice for young journalists. 

Violet Conroy: You’ve worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2013. How would you describe your beat? 

Rachel Aviv: I’ve always been interested in contested versions of reality, and the ways in which medicine or science gets overused, misused or misunderstood. I’m also interested in the way that the lives of individuals get shaped by social or psychiatric theories that may or may not actually capture their experiences. 

VC: How did you first become interested in these topics? 

RA: I had a strangely profound experience in my early twenties when I read The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn Saks, which is a memoir about her life with schizophrenia. I realised I had not understood what psychosis was; I had heard that word, but I had never seen someone break down, on a granular level, what it feels like to be psychotic. I felt like it was this realm of human experience that wasn’t being written about in specific and thoughtful ways. That tipped me into the direction of writing about psychiatry, partly because it’s often this languageless space. And putting language to it can be really useful, to help people see that they are not isolated in their experience.

VC: You write with remarkable compassion and nuance about these topics. How would you describe your approach? 

RA: There is always such a temptation to use stock language to describe these things. There are certain well-trodden ways of describing psychosis, or the psychological ramifications of abuse, or many other traumatic experiences. But I’m often trying to ask questions that get away from the phrases and formulations we already know. 

VC: Are there any writers of narrative nonfiction that have been particularly influential to you? 

RA: In my early twenties, I read Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and the work of Janet Malcolm and Tracy Kidder. I didn’t quite realise that this form even existed – nonfiction writing that adopted a lot of the conventions of fiction, but recounted things that had actually happened. 

“I’ve always been interested in contested versions of reality, and the ways in which medicine or science gets overused, misused or misunderstood” – Rachel Aviv 

VC: What are some narrative nonfiction books that you would recommend for people who want to get into the genre? 

RA: Lives Other Than My Own by Emmanuel Carrère is a really incredible book. Ghosts of the Tsunami by Richard Lloyd Parry. I love everything by Janet Malcolm. The Susan Sheehan book, Is There No Place on Earth for Me? Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose.

VC: What inspired your new book? 

RA: I was so captivated by the ideas that were circulating through the story I wrote about Alice Munro [for The New Yorker]. There were so many poignant moments where she reflected on her sense of failure; she felt like she failed her mother by not being there when she was sick and died, and failed her daughter by not acknowledging the harm that had been done to her. She reflected so powerfully, even if she couldn’t act on it, on how those two decisions haunted her life. I started thinking about writing a book about the mother-daughter pair, and then realised how many stories I had already written that were about that pair. So I decided to go back and flesh out that dynamic more in what I’d already written. 

VC: How has the experience of becoming a mother changed your perspective on the stories you want to tell? 

RA: I became more aware of the limitations of my own curiosities and preoccupations, which had then filtered into the kinds of questions I was asking of people. There were some very interesting questions that I didn’t ask because somehow my curiosity just wasn’t there. There are three stories in the book where there are deaths of babies, or mothers who were forced to give up their babies for adoption. For whatever reason, I had not included those losses in the story. I know one has to streamline and tell the story in an efficient way, but it was strange that I had made that choice three times. 

VC: What is the meaning behind the name of the book, You Won’t Get Free of It? 

RA: It’s a line from one of Alice Munro’s stories, which seems to draw from her autobiography. It’s about a woman who leaves her young children for a man, and in the story she says, “You won’t get free of it, but you won’t die of it. You won’t feel it every minute, but you won’t spend many days without it. And you’ll learn some tricks to dull it or banish it, trying not to end up destroying what you incurred this pain to get.” I felt like it spoke to the primal, foundational nature of the bond between mothers and daughters. Even when you escape from it, you’re still in relation to it. 

“Something I often worry about is: how many ideas does one person have?” – Rachel Aviv 

VC: What makes for a compelling story? And how do you find them? 

RA: This part of the process is by far the hardest for me, and the one about which I feel the most despair on a routine basis. Usually the stories I write are about an individual or a group of individuals who are intersecting in some way with an institution or a larger issue. The thing I’m always looking for is a person whose life has been transformed in relation to some larger question, issue or social structure that feels significant. 

Sometimes I find stories by word of mouth, or sometimes a scholar will write to me and say, “Have you looked into this?” But mostly I search for things and have certain questions that are often sparked by previous stories. It’s just so serendipitous. There’s no system. I’ve heard people say that when they look for ideas, they never come. But I do spend a lot of time actively looking for ideas and thinking of the things that I’m curious about and then trying to research and figure out if there are cases that illuminate that question. 

VC: Is an element of mystery important in the stories you tell? 

RA: Maybe not mystery … but I don’t like stories where you have a certain set of ideas and they play out. I would rather it feel like I’m not quite sure where I’m going to land, or what I’m going to figure out. I don't want to know what the answer is. 

VC: What advice would you give to young journalists who are starting out now?

RA: It’s so hard. It’s a conversation that a lot of my friends who are writers are having. We have this fear and awareness of how small this field is becoming and how people’s reading desires and habits are changing as well. I think it’s good to develop a space of expertise. You can also be a writer and do something else. I always wished that I had two careers, as a writer and a clinical psychologist. Some of the most interesting writers do; they’re also anthropologists or doctors. That’s a practical suggestion too, because it’s just hard to exist in a world in which your money is coming from writing. I know a lot of writers who are now training to be psychoanalysts. 

Something I often worry about is: how many ideas does one person have? I think about how to make sure I’m not recirculating the same ideas, but trying out new things, because I think there’s a way in which writers can do the same thing too many times.

VC: What are you working on next? 

RA: I’d like to figure out how to write a book-length thing that is one narrative. I’ve gotten into this mode where I want to tell stories in under 20,000 words, so it feels like a challenge to figure out how to tell a story that is longer than that. 

You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters by Rachel Aviv is published by Fern Press and is out now.