Rachel Aviv: ‘There’s a way of writing about motherhood that can be very sentimental and boring’

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Interviewing Rachel Aviv is a great way to source reading recommendations. The exacting essayist responds to my questions about her new book by asking if I’ve read her colleague Parul Sehgal on the trauma plot (of course), Janet Malcolm’s oeuvre (are you kidding?), or Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose (you know, I’ve been meaning to). And then there’s the self-help book from the 90s making the rounds among her friends.

The Middle Passage – “a bad title”, admits Aviv – advances the Jungian belief that if you hold on to the identity you first developed in young adulthood, in middle age you’ll end up small and afraid. You have to alter something fundamental in order to make it to the other side. Over green tea at a cafe near her home in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, the New Yorker staff writer on the deliciously nebulous “psychology, medical ethics and criminal justice” beat confirms that’s basically, frustratingly true. “I have always been very afraid of change,” she says. “I had a really profound high school relationship where I totally lost myself. Everything I’d been interested in before just fell away.” She feared this would happen when she gave birth to her first child in 2017, and was thrilled when it didn’t: “I thought I had won, as if there weren’t more opportunities for change later down the road.”

Professionally, Aviv has won many times over. She is one of our greatest magazine writers, partly because she is obsessively passionate about the details of her stories – she has so internalized the show, don’t tell maxim that she is actively trying to “just say what I think” more often – and because she understands how those details might complicate the narratives about humanity no one else questions. Encountering her New Yorker cartoon headshot – whose wispy brown hair and blue eyes prove accurate in person – is like a signpost: you are about to read a piece of writing that could change how you choose to live. Her profile of psychologist and misinformation expert Elizabeth Loftus received a 2022 National Magazine award. Second Life, about a woman whose schizophrenia diagnosis was apparently cured after she went through chemotherapy, was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize. Her investigation into Alice Munro’s partner’s molestation of Munro’s youngest daughter, overlooked in reality and yet incorporated into Munro’s beloved fiction, received a George Polk award last year.

Aviv’s second collection of essays includes these, plus three more previous New Yorker stories, reworked (and some re-reported) with the frame of the mother-daughter relationship in mind. “There is a way of writing about motherhood that can be very sentimental and reductive and kind of boring,” Aviv says. She chose a dynamic many of us can relate to and removed it from the usual contexts. This allows us to become temporary analysts in the middle of our reading, and then weepy sentimentalists the moment it’s over, when we realize how much it makes us think of our own private failings and moments of fleeting success when it comes to how we parent or how we handle being parented.

The title, You Won’t Get Free of It, comes from a line in Munro’s short story, The Children Stay, which describes the “chronic” pain 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 spend many days without it. And you’ll learn some tricks to dull it or banish it, trying not to end up destroying what you incurred this pain to get.”

It was Aviv’s reporting on Munro that provided an impetus for the book – that, and the fact of a two-book deal with Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Her previous collection, Strangers to Ourselves, published in 2022, uses case studies of mental health mysteries to roam what Aviv calls the “psychic hinterlands”, armed with seemingly boundless empathy, a unique skill for locating and sifting through archives and a prose style that spins the driest of psychiatric terminology into suspenseful narrative gold. Aviv explored her own experience being diagnosed with anorexia at age six, a label that became a kind of trap, by pairing her medical records with her childhood journal: “I had some thing that was a siknis its cald anexorea,” a young Aviv wrote. She had it “because I want to be someone better than me”.

You Won’t Get Free of It invites readers in with a personal preface. Aviv recounts her mother’s aspirations to become a serious writer, and the summer she planned a DIY residency in a cottage in coastal Maine. When Aviv called after three days at sleepaway camp, announcing a plan to drown herself in the lake, she drove seven hours to pick her up the next day. They did, in fact, write – Aviv’s mother worked on a story that was never published, while next to her, on the floor, Aviv produced a story about a child loving her mother to a hysteric degree. “All the stupid things I created were received with wonder,” Aviv says. “I got exposed to the dream of writing at a very early age, and she idealized even the struggle of being a writer … She made me feel like I had a special gift.”

Aviv does have a gift. Take how she finds non-famous subjects. The first piece she wrote for the New Yorker, at age 28, was about Linda Bishop, a young mother who was on and off medication her whole life, until she spent the last four months of her life in an abandoned farmhouse living off apples and rainwater. Aviv discovered Bishop’s case by rooting around a database kept by psychiatrist E Fuller Torrey – “who has his own specific agenda about feeling like people should be medicated more, which I disagree with”, Aviv notes – and she saw a single line in a newspaper article mentioning that Bishop had written journals, which intrigued her enough to contact Bishop’s sister. “It began with a question, which was, ‘How do you know when to force someone to be treated against their will?’ and I was looking for ways to tell that question as a story.”

Bishop’s story is included in the new collection, and revisiting it inspired mild horror in Aviv. She couldn’t believe she’d never asked a follow-up question about Bishop losing a child. How had that not mattered? She felt she had unevenly identified with the position of the woman as individual, not who she was to her children, or who she was to herself when she assumed the mother identity. “I was really into the idea of a psychiatric case study, for many years. It just felt like the ideal form,” Aviv tells me. But that narrow focus “was like I had allowed for 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 a culmination of Aviv’s desire to widen her scope. These days, she says, her ideal assignment “would tell an entire life”. While the original New Yorker version hits all the beats necessary to understand the internalization of abuse, the invalidation of the victim, and the excuses the sexual liberation movement provided, the book version changes the structure. Munro’s Alzheimer’s and her sense of what she could and could not process about her past decisions is revealed only at the end, after we’ve watched a whole world build and then unspool.

When Aviv went into labor with her first child, she brought court records related to a piece she was working on to the hospital. After giving birth, she started reading them there in the bed. Aviv writes that this was related to that desire to cling to her old self, to her identity as a writer, the ideal her own mother had instilled.

You Won’t Get Free of It comes out in a moment when being a mother in America is increasingly fraught. The fertility rate is falling, which you can blame on soaring costs of childcare, fears about the future of the planet, or plain ambivalence. Wanting a kid has become politicized, absorbed by a Maga agenda that has labeled a life experience everyone should have access to with the dirty little word “trad”.

For all of Aviv’s literary references, she has not heard of Yesteryear, the 12-week New York Times bestseller about a tradwife influencer who wakes up on a real 1800s ranch. I summarize the plot. She listens politely but looks bewildered. No, none of that was on her agenda. She doesn’t have an agenda at all. She has stories.

It follows that You Won’t Get Free of It is refreshingly discourse-free, uninterested in winning an argument and determined to tell how it feels to be inside the mother-daughter relationship, which Aviv finds “perhaps more than any other, seems to defy a fixed point of view”. That’s Aviv’s style. She can’t imagine otherwise. “I guess you convince yourself,” she says, “that what you write is the only way the story could have been written.” It’s not so different from how she parents: “I fundamentally feel that the child I have is becoming the self that they were already going to become. I can hinder or help, but the creation lies with them.” Having empathy for others ultimately lies with us, but Aviv’s work can only help.