Book Synopsis

A collection of reported stories that explore the relationship between mothers and daughters, by the award-winning author of Strangers to Ourselves.

You Won't Get Free of It tells the stories of mothers and daughters searching for each other (and for themselves). With uncanny depth of perception, Aviv explores the complexity of this relationship in seven essays, six originally published in The New Yorker and reconceived for this intimate, revelatory book. "I wrote some of these stories feeling, existentially, like a daughter, and now I have returned to them with a different identification," Aviv writes. "It was as if I had failed to see the drama that was on the mother's side, too--her particular longings and humiliations and needs."

Aviv writes about one mother searching for her vanished daughter; another who sacrifices herself for her daughters by working as a nanny for other people's children. In the final story, a daughter's traumatic experience is erased by her family, only to be recast by her mother--the writer Alice Munro--in stories celebrated around the world. You Won't Get Free of It is an astonishing exploration of the competing dynamics of knowing and unknowing, recognition and refusal, that shape our most foundational relationship. Illuminating ineffable registers of human experience, Aviv asks piercing questions about how disowned knowledge forms and deforms families and lives.

About the Author

RACHEL AVIV is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes about medicine, education, and criminal justice, among other subjects. In 2022, she won a National Magazine Award for Profile Writing. A 2019 National Fellow at New America, she received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2020. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.