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 parents’ 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 investigation 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.

Aviv is an instinctive storyteller * Observer *
I admire her rigor and eloquence but also her restraint - she makes vivid experiences we can't explain -- Ben Lerner
Janet Malcolm's successor at the New Yorker * Tablet *

Rachel Aviv is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes about medicine, education, criminal justice, and 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 to support her work on Strangers to Ourselves. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.