One summer, Rachel Aviv went away to sleepaway camp in Maine while her mother rented a house some hours away for a self-imposed writing retreat. In a scene that could be a playbook for Annie Baker’s film Janet Planet, the writer recounts calling her mother a few days into her time at camp to say she “was considering jumping into the lake and drowning.” Her mother picks her up, and the two spend the summer together, doing some writing, and some not writing. Her mother’s plans to conceive groundbreaking fiction are foiled, but being together feels natural for the two of them. They were, after all, attached at the hip, in a kind of “overwhelming and exhausting fusion.”
When exactly does this fusion end? Or does it simply never? These are the animating questions at the heart of Aviv’s new essay collection, You Won’t Get Free of It, which tells the stories of mothers and daughters whose relationships are complicated, yet inexorable: from a nanny who leaves her family in the Philippines only to become attached to new, surrogate children, to a young schoolteacher who goes missing for long stretches of time, her mother left searching for her for years on end. They are the kind of slippery and ambiguous stories to which only a writer like Aviv, so committed to interpreting and explaining her subjects, could give form.
There is, of course, a rich literature on mother-daughter inextricability, from Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments (1987) to Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Are You My Mother? (2012). A slate of more recent motherhood memoirs have also taken on similar quandaries of tumult and transference, such as Lena Dunham’s Famesick (2026), which plumbs her ever-shifting relationship with her mother, the artist Laurie Simmons, after Dunham’s fame begins to lap her mother’s, and Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025), which explores what happens when our relationships with our mothers begin to feel barbarous and distant. “For years, Arundhati was estranged from her mother,” the critic Rebecca Mead writes in a recent review of Roy’s memoir. “Yet she was never free of her.”
But You Won’t Get Free of It is a different kind of book; one far less claustrophobic than many mother-daughter memoirs, wherein the reader often walks away with an understanding of one—or maybe two, if we’re lucky—unique perspectives on a particular relationship. In this collection, Aviv excavates her own relationships and experience, in order to open up and illuminate others’ stories. In her hands motherhood is a tight bond, but also one perpetually remade by distance, memory, and reexamination. It is not so much an endless struggle to be escaped as it is an infinitely complex starting point for larger stories.
Since the beginning of her career, Rachel Aviv has been writing about people whose experiences can’t be easily explained by preconceived rules and definitions, whether that’s in the world of medicine or law. Her first book, Strangers to Ourselves, was about Aviv’s own hospitalization for anorexia at the ripe age of six: an outlier of a situation in the world of psychiatry, since anorexia, some researchers believe, is a “reading disorder”—that is, as Aviv puts it, a condition “brought on by uncritical consumption of texts that present thinness as the feminine ideal”—and at six years old, Aviv could barely read. This personal anecdote, as well as that of a girl she met on the floor of her hospital ward, foreshadows the rest of the book, which examines the stories of other patients whose afflictions don’t fit neatly into the restricting confines of a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders definition, but who have at times felt hemmed in by those definitions nonetheless.
For avid readers of Aviv’s deeply researched narrative reporting in The New Yorker, where she’s been writing since 2011, Strangers to Ourselves was a fascinating unveiling of her motivations as a journalist. You Won’t Get Free of It serves a similar purpose, sharing bits of biography that inform the rest of the collection. The book’s preface is a previously unpublished personal piece, while the remaining six reported essays first appeared in some shape or form in The New Yorker. Those essays, some of which Aviv revised for this book, are not just her typical tales of confounding mental illnesses and cognitive dissonance, but rather stories that Aviv reframes as reflections on motherhood; as she reexamines them, she brings to the surface details that she had once overlooked, but which now seem to reveal new emotional and psychological dimensions.
The first essay, for which Aviv mined her mother’s diaries as well as her own childhood journals, begins with some biography of Aviv’s mother, who could only have dreamed of the kind of career her daughter has today. She always wanted to be a writer, Aviv tells us, submitting her short fiction time and time again to The New Yorker, never getting anything published, but trying again and again anyway. Her mother’s life, as the lives of mother-artists usually are, was defined by a constant battle between the priorities of parenting and art-making, which Aviv’s clingy nature didn’t make any easier.
But her mother was proud of her, and throughout Aviv’s adolescence and into her adulthood, she was happy to be her close collaborator and at times, her editor. Aviv shared her college essays with her mother, who would reply “like an English teacher,” offering constructive feedback here and there. But even after Aviv became a professional journalist, her mother would continue to weigh in on her published work, unable to let go of the image of Aviv scribbling in her notebook as a would-be camper.
On the heels of Aviv’s longform investigation into the short story writer Alice Munro—which is included in this collection—Aviv’s mother wrote to her with worry that “she was sure that she, too, must have failed to protect [Aviv] from sexual abuse.” It’s an outrageous, if overly simplified assumption for her mother to make, but it’s also not impossible to understand: If Aviv began to investigate stories of elusive illness due to her own experience of a childhood eating disorder, is it so unreasonable to infer that she might have been interested in a story of sexual assault out of an affinity too? Aviv views her mother’s “delusion of reference” as an indication that she is still hovering over her like she did when Aviv was a child.
Aviv’s increased interest in Munro’s story, and other mother-daughter dyads, comes, however, from her own experience of becoming a mother. Perhaps it’s a truism to say that becoming a mother changes you: It’s one that Aviv herself tried to resist, reading court records in bed for a story she was working on almost immediately after giving birth to her first child. But she takes pains to emphasize how this change was not only inevitable, but also directly shaped her work. Before she was a mother, she tells us, she “had somehow thought [she] was writing from the daughter’s perspective.” But years later, reexamining that work for this book, she realizes “how many stories were also about the mother, waiting for messages she thought were hers to understand.”
The best example of this shift in perspective is the story of Hannah Upp, about whom Aviv originally wrote for The New Yorker in 2018. Upp was the closeted daughter of two ministers—each with differing opinions on homosexuality—who, after graduating from Bryn Mawr, moved to New York City to work as a schoolteacher. She disappeared on what was supposed to be her first day of class and was found three weeks later bobbing in the New York harbor, with seemingly no memory of where she had been since the day she vanished. Over the next few years, Upp suffered at least one more “dissociative fugue” before she went missing amid Hurricane Irma on the island of St. Thomas, where she had moved to teach at a Montessori school. Her mother, Barbara, flew out as soon as she could and stayed on the island for months, searching to no avail. She eventually made peace with the idea that she would never completely understand what had happened to her daughter or why.
At the time Aviv reported this story, Barbara requested that she let her daughter’s fugues “stay a mystery.” While Aviv alluded in her original piece to the complicated relationships and split loyalties Upp had with her parents, she didn’t push too hard to connect her upbringing to her dissociative episodes. But seven years later, during the writing of You Won’t Get Free of It, Aviv—now a mother of two—has arrived at a new perspective. When she wrote the original story, she was around the same age as Upp, and “maybe … had been inclined to imagine that, in her early adulthood, Hannah had achieved more psychological separation from her family dynamics than she actually had.” Meanwhile, reading through her notes, Aviv realizes that she had left out a detail she wouldn’t have now: Before Upp was born, Barbara had another baby who died shortly after birth. Her mother, in other words, had been mourning a missing child, but “at the time I resisted a detail that seemed too symbolic, even if it was true.”
Aviv found a similar pattern of newly revealing details upon reviewing the first piece she ever wrote for The New Yorker. The story was about a woman named Linda Bishop, who, like “nearly half of people given a diagnosis of psychotic illness, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, say that they are not mentally ill,” and thus refuse to take medication, inadvertently alienating family and friends in the process. After leaving a psychiatric hospital her family coaxed her into, Bishop went out on her own, eventually coming across a vacant house for sale where she lived eating only apples until she died of starvation. Bishop, a God-fearing woman in her state of psychosis, believed she was waiting for a lover—a man who, in reality, she had only met a few times—to show up and save her.
In Aviv’s original piece for The New Yorker, the story of Linda Bishop highlights the many limitations of psychiatry. In addition to observing that it is “the only field in which refusal of treatment is commonly viewed as a manifestation of illness rather than as an authentic wish,” Aviv also positions Bishop as someone whose illness was the central, devastating difficulty in an otherwise happy life. Bishop was educated, well adjusted, and came from a family with “loving and supportive parents”; she was a good student who had a bright future, her parents thought perhaps she’d even become a professor. Aviv is also sympathetic to the ways in which families have contended with stigma around mental illness, including hurtful assumptions that they are in some way to blame for their loved one’s condition, noting that a prominent theory in the 1970s held that “the root of schizophrenia was a ‘schizophrenogenic mother,’ incapable of communicating her love.”
The new version of this story in You Won’t Get Free of It offers a very different portrayal of Bishop. The reference to the “schizophrenogenic mother” is gone, perhaps because even mentioning that it has been debunked still gives it room in the text, and could lead to unwanted inferences. Meanwhile, Bishop appears here as a woman with significant familial and personal trauma—which does not entirely explain her illness, but does seem to provide important context for her experience. When Aviv went back through her interview transcripts and spoke again to Bishop’s sister for this book, she learned that Bishop and her sister were both adopted after her mother had lost two young children to illnesses, a fact that their parents never discussed with their children. (The fact of adoption is significant, as schizophrenia is thought to be largely hereditary, though Aviv does not note this; Bishop may have understood her condition more readily if she had known her family medical history.)
Bishop herself had also lost a child. Right after high school, Aviv learns, she got pregnant and her parents sent her to a home for unwed mothers, where she was forced to give birth and put her own baby up for adoption. “I don’t think anyone was with her when she gave birth,” her sister tells Aviv. A teenage girl giving birth alone and then deprived of her child: It must have been a terrifying, emotionally shattering, and unmooring experience, and it was something Bishop rarely spoke about as an adult. Aviv was 28 when she reported the original story and did not yet have children: “Apparently, at the time I did not think losing a child was a biographical fact relevant enough to mention. I had not even asked a follow-up question.”
Reading Aviv’s reassessment of her reporting and re-reporting, one has to admire her dedication to doing justice to someone else’s story, or “getting things right,” as much as one can. But equally admirable is her admission of just how much her own shifting perspective has directly shaped how she tells those stories.
When Aviv thinks back to when her mother picked her up from camp, she reflects that “now, if my daughter were to call from camp crying, I’m not sure I would so quickly and selflessly set aside my plans.” In fact, Aviv thinks that when it comes to the camp story, both she and her mother “made the wrong choice.”
Who is to say that is the right judgment? Just as a daughter’s perspective is partial, so is a mother’s. As Aviv so compellingly suggests in this book, the bond between the mother and her daughter is profound, perpetual, and deeply ingrained. We cannot get free of it, as hard as we may try. But we can acknowledge it. And that should do us some good.
