Rachel Aviv Challenges Sentimental Motherhood Narratives
Pulitzer-nominated New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv has released a new essay collection, You Won't Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, which investigates the mother-daughter relationship through five previously published pieces, reworked with a maternal lens. In an interview, Aviv stated, "There is a way of writing about motherhood that can be very sentimental and reductive and kind of boring." The book aims to present a more complex, nuanced view of this bond.
The Book's Origins and Title
The title comes from Alice Munro's short story The Children Stay, describing the chronic pain a mother feels when leaving her children. Aviv's reporting on Munro—who won a George Polk Award for her investigation into Munro's partner's molestation of her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner—provided impetus for the collection. Aviv also had a two-book deal, following her 2022 collection Strangers to Ourselves, which explored mental health mysteries.
Personal Reflections and Motherhood
The book opens with a personal preface recounting Aviv's own mother, who aspired to be a writer. Aviv recalls a summer when her mother drove seven hours to pick her up from sleepaway camp after Aviv threatened to drown herself. They spent the summer writing together, with Aviv's mother idealizing the writer's struggle. Aviv says, "She made me feel like I had a special gift." Aviv herself brought court records to the hospital when giving birth to her first child, clinging to her identity as a writer.
Widening the Scope
Aviv's earlier work, such as her piece on Linda Bishop—a young mother who died in an abandoned farmhouse—focused narrowly on the individual's psychiatric case. Revisiting it for the new collection, Aviv felt she had neglected Bishop's role as a mother. "I was really into the idea of a psychiatric case study," she says, but that narrow focus "was like I had allowed for the interiority of one person and not the other part of that dynamic." The Munro story in the book version restructures the narrative, revealing Munro's Alzheimer's and her processing of past decisions only at the end.
Discourse-Free and Empathetic
Aviv's collection is refreshingly discourse-free, uninterested in political arguments. She says she doesn't have an agenda, only stories. The book aims to capture the feeling of being inside the mother-daughter relationship, which Aviv finds "perhaps more than any other, seems to defy a fixed point of view." Her approach to writing mirrors her parenting philosophy: "I fundamentally feel that the child I have is becoming the self that they were already going to become. I can hinder or help, but the creation lies with them."
You Won't Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters is out now in the US via Knopf and on 9 July in the UK via Fern Press.
