Rachel Aviv, a staff writer at The New Yorker known for her incisive essays on psychology and medical ethics, has released a new collection of essays titled You Won’t Get Free of It.
The book reframes her award-winning journalism through the lens of motherhood, examining the intricate and often contradictory bonds between mothers and daughters.
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Aviv, a Pulitzer finalist and multiple award winner, says she wanted to avoid sentimental or reductive portrayals of motherhood.
Instead, she chose stories that complicate the narrative, allowing readers to become analysts while reading and emotional afterward.
From Personal to Universal
The book opens with a personal preface.
Aviv recounts her mother's dream of becoming a writer and a summer they spent writing together in Maine.
When Aviv, then at sleepaway camp, threatened to drown herself, her mother drove seven hours to pick her up.
They wrote side by side—her mother on an unpublished story, Aviv on a tale about a child's hysterical love for her mother.
“All the stupid things I created were received with wonder,” Aviv recalls.
“I got exposed to the dream of writing at a very early age, and she idealized even the struggle of being a writer.”
That early encouragement shaped Aviv's career.
Her first New Yorker piece, at age 28, profiled Linda Bishop, a young mother who spent her final months in an abandoned farmhouse.
Aviv discovered the case through a psychiatrist's database and was intrigued by a single line about Bishop's journals.
