IReading Rachel Aviv’s interview is a great way to get recommendations. The precise essayist answered my questions about his new book by asking if I had read his colleague Parul Sehgal. shock plot (of course), Janet Malcolm’s work (are you kidding?), or Parallel Lives By Phyllis Rose (You know, I’ve been Meaning To). And then there’s the 90s self-help book circulating among her friends.
The Middle Passage – “a bad title”, Aviv admits – advances the Jungian belief that if you maintain the identity you first developed in young adulthood, you will become small and fearful in middle age. To get to the other side you have to make some fundamental changes. Sipping green tea at a café near his home in Park Slope, Brooklyn, the deliciously vague New Yorker staff writer on “psychology, medical ethics and criminal justice” confirmed that this is basically disappointingly true. “I’ve always been very afraid of change,” she says. “I had a very intense relationship with high school, where I completely lost myself. Everything I was interested in before was gone.” When she gave birth to her first child in 2016 she feared this would happen, and was thrilled when it didn’t: “I felt like I had won, as if there were no more opportunities for change in the future.”
Professionally, Aviv has won several times. She is one of our greatest magazine writers, partly because she is obsessively passionate about the details of her stories – she has absorbed so much of it show, don’t tell Saying she’s actively trying to “just” Tell What I think” more often — and because she understands how those details can complicate narratives about humanity, no one raises any more questions. Confronting Your New Yorker The cartoon headshot – whose wispy brown hair and blue eyes prove accurate in person – is like a signpost: You are about to read an article that can change the way you live. His profile Psychologist and misinformation expert Elizabeth Loftus receives the 2022 National Magazine Award. second Lifeabout a woman whose schizophrenia diagnosis was apparently cured after undergoing chemotherapy, was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize. His Investigation The molestation of Monroe’s youngest daughter by Alice Monroe’s partner was ignored in reality and yet included in Monroe’s beloved fiction, which earned her a George Polk Award last year.
Aviv’s second collection of essays includes these, as well as three more previous New Yorker stories, reworked (and some re-reported) with the focus on the mother-daughter relationship. “There’s a way of writing about motherhood that can be very emotional, frustrating, and boring,” says Aviv. He took a dynamic that many of us could relate to and removed it from normal contexts. It allows us to become temporary analysts in the middle of our reading, and then to become tearful sentimentalists once it’s over, when we realize how much it makes us think about our own personal failures and moments of fleeting success when it comes to how we become parents or how we handle parenthood.
The title, You Won’t Get Free of It, comes from a line from Munro’s short story, The Children Stay, which describes the “long-term” pain that a mother experiences when she leaves her children for a man: “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 go many days without it. And you’ll learn some tricks to ease it or eliminate it, called Try not to destroy what you have endured to get this pain.”
It was Aviv’s reporting on Monroe that provided the inspiration for the book – that, and the fact of the two-book deal. His previous collection, Strangers to Ourselves, published in 2022, uses case studies of mental health mysteries from what Aviv calls the “psychic hinterland,” armed with seemingly limitless empathy, an uncanny skill for locating and sifting through archives, and a prose style that turns the driest psychiatric terminology into suspenseful narrative gold. Aviv explored her experience of suffering from anorexia at the age of six, a label that had become a kind of trap, by combining her medical records with her childhood journal: “I had something that was a sicnis, it was called anexorea,” a young Aviv wrote. She had it “because I wanted to be a better person than I was”.
You will not be free from this Invites readers with a personal introduction. Aviv remembers her mother’s aspirations to become a serious writer, and over the summer she planned a DIY residency at a cottage in coastal Maine. When Aviv called announcing his plans to drown himself in the lake after three days at the sleepaway camp, he drove seven hours to pick her up the next day. In fact, he wrote – Aviv’s mother worked on a story that was never published, while next to her, on the floor, Aviv wrote a story about a child who loved his mother to the point of hysteria. “All the stupid things I made were accepted with surprise,” says Aviv. “I was introduced to the dream of writing at a very young age, and they also idealized the struggle of being a writer… They made me feel like I had a special gift.”
Aviv has a gift. Here’s how she finds non-famous subjects. The first article she wrote for The New Yorker, at the age of 28, was about Linda Bishop, a young mother who had been on and off medication her entire life, until she spent the last four months of her life living on apples and rainwater in an abandoned farmhouse. Aviv researched Bishop’s case based on a database kept by psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey – “who has his own specific agenda about feeling that people should be given more medication, which I disagree with”, Aviv notes – and he saw a line in a newspaper article that mentioned Bishop had kept journals, which intrigued him enough to contact Bishop’s sister. “It started with a question, which was, ‘How do you know when to force someone into treatment against their will?’ And I was looking for ways to tell that question in story form.
Bishop’s story is included in the new collection, and revisiting it inspired a mild horror in Aviv. She couldn’t believe she never asked Bishop any follow-up questions about losing a child. How did it not matter? She felt that she personally identified unequivocally with the woman’s position, not with who she was to her children, or who she was herself when she assumed the identity of mother. “I’d actually been toying with the idea of doing a psychiatric case study for several years. This felt like the perfect form,” Aviv told me. But that narrow focus was “like I allowed the interiority of one person and not the other part of that dynamic”.
The story of Alice Munro and her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner is the culmination of Aviv’s desire to expand her horizons. These days, she says, her ideal work will “tell a whole life”. While the original New Yorker version hits all the points needed to understand the internalization of abuse, the invalidation of the victim, and the excuses provided by the sexual liberation movement, the book version changes the structure. Monroe’s understanding of her Alzheimer’s and her past decisions about what she could and couldn’t do comes to light only at the end, when we’ve watched an entire world form and then unravel.
When Aviv went into labor with her first child, she came to the hospital with court records related to the piece she was working on. After giving birth to the child, she started reading to him right there on the bed. Aviv writes that this was related to his desire to remain connected to his old self, his identity as a writer, the ideal established by his mother.
You will not be free from this It comes at a moment when it becomes increasingly difficult to be a mother in America. Fertility rates are falling, which you can blame on the rising costs of child care, fears about the future of the planet, or general indecisiveness. The desire to have children has been politicized, subsumed by the MAGA agenda, which has labeled it a life experience that everyone should have access to, equating it with the dirty little word “tradition.”
Despite all of Aviv’s literary references, he hasn’t heard of the 12-week New York Times Bestseller about a tradeswoman influencer who wakes up on a real 1800s farm. Let me summarize the plot. She listens politely but looks bewildered. No, none of this was on his agenda. He has no agenda at all. He has stories.
This suggests that You Won’t Get Free of It is refreshingly sermon-free, uninterested in winning an argument and determined to convey what it feels like to be inside a mother-daughter relationship, which Aviv finds “perhaps more than any other, rejecting a certain point of view”. This is Aviv’s style. She can’t imagine otherwise. “I think you convince yourself,” she says, “that what you write may be the only way to write a story.” It’s not much different from the way she becomes a parent: “I basically feel like the child I have is becoming who they were already going to be. I can hinder or help, but the creation is with them.” It’s ultimately up to us to be empathetic toward others, but Aviv’s work can only help.
