{"id":851607,"date":"2026-08-11T16:28:16","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T16:28:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/851607\/"},"modified":"2026-08-11T16:28:16","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T16:28:16","slug":"you-wont-get-free-of-it-by-rachel-aviv-review-a-subtle-study-of-the-mother-daughter-bond-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/851607\/","title":{"rendered":"You Won\u2019t Get Free of It by Rachel Aviv review \u2013 a subtle study of the mother-daughter bond | Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rachel Aviv has a profound interest in the vagaries of human psychology: Strangers to Ourselves, her last book, profiled five people whose psychiatric states resisted straightforward explanation, testing the limits of the mental health system. A Pulitzer finalist, Aviv has\u00a0become known for rigorous, penetrating journalism that is as empathic as it is insightful. Now comes You Won\u2019t Get Free of It, six stories of mothers and daughters, all originally published in the New Yorker.<\/p>\n

Madness runs through this book, too, in the stories of Linda Bishop, a woman who, upon discharge from hospital after a psychotic break, holed up in an abandoned farmhouse and tried to subsist on apples alone, and of Mary, a woman whose delusions and paranoia were only seemingly cured as a side-effect of chemotherapy. It\u2019s also there in the childhood memories of the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus \u2013 a professional court witness for those who have been accused of abuse, one\u00a0of whom was Harvey Weinstein. Loftus\u2019s mother was found drowned, perhaps as a result of suicide. In Aviv\u2019s masterly profile, she teases out a conclusion that leaves you pondering the extent to which this memory expert can rely on her own recollections, and what that says about\u00a0her particular line of work.<\/p>\n

Of the mother representing madness, Marguerite Duras said: \u201cOur mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we\u2019ve ever met.\u201d Yet there is psychological instability here on the part of daughters, too: Hannah Upp, whose story opens the collection, suffered from fugue states that would lead to her eventual disappearance. Aviv compassionately chronicles her mother\u2019s desperate quest to find her.<\/p>\n

double quotation markAviv\u2019s investigation into Munro\u2019s failure to protect her daughter Andrea from abuse is the standout piece here<\/p>\n

In the preface, Aviv writes about her\u00a0interest in the \u201chide and seek\u201d dynamic of mother-daughter pairings, and indeed, each of these stories could be said to represent an acting out of that game. What is interesting is that Aviv, too, is a player. \u201cIt was as if I had failed to see the drama on the mother\u2019s side, too \u2013 her particular longings and humiliations and needs,\u201d she writes, of her own journalism.<\/p>\n

Aviv admits to a previous \u201cdeficit of\u00a0curiosity\u201d about mothers. It is admirable how clear-eyed she is about these failures of imagination, which became apparent only after she herself became a mother. In Bishop\u2019s case Aviv neglected to mention, or consider, the possible impact of a baby\u00a0given up for adoption when Bishop was a young woman. \u201cI had not\u00a0even asked a follow-up question,\u201d Aviv admits, and you can feel her embarrassment. She has gone back and remedied the \u201cimbalance\u201d for the purposes of this collection, but the discussion itself prompts a fascinating question: to what extent does a woman\u2019s motherhood \u2013 or lack thereof \u2013 contribute to her perspective as\u00a0a\u00a0writer?<\/p>\n

It is not a question with an easy answer, not least in the case of novelist Alice Munro. Aviv\u2019s investigation into Munro\u2019s utter failure to protect her daughter, Andrea, from the abuse of her partner, Gerry, is the standout piece here. While it is claimed Munro knew of the abuse<\/a>, was able to make reference to it in her art (Aviv\u2019s tracing\u00a0of it through Munro\u2019s writing is\u00a0meticulous), she chose not to act. That choice \u2013 the cowardice of it \u2013 and\u00a0its lifelong repercussions for her daughters may never have come fully to light were it not for the persistence of several journalists, Aviv included. Munro emerges a pathetic figure; I have been unable to read her since.<\/p>\n

However our mothers behave, the\u00a0fact is we will never truly know them. Aviv writes, not entirely comfortably, of how she is essentially living out her own mother\u2019s dream career. The editorial comments she leaves on\u00a0Aviv\u2019s work \u2013 such as a note about caring for a suicidal friend on an\u00a0article about mental illness \u2013 constitute for her daughter a \u201cchronic delusion of reference\u201d. It\u2019s a neat theory \u2013 but as a writer whose mother sometimes gives similarly self-reflective feedback, I found myself wondering if what we have here is simply a mother\u2019s insistence that she was, and remains, a person, if her daughter would only care to look.<\/p>\n

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You Won\u2019t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters by Rachel Aviv is published by Fern (\u00a320). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rachel Aviv has a profound interest in the vagaries of human psychology: Strangers to Ourselves, her last book,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":851608,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64,63,134],"class_list":["post-851607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=851607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851607\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/851608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=851607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=851607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=851607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}