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- New Yorker journalist Rachel Aviv’s essay collection “You Won’t Get Free of It” probes fractured mother-daughter bonds, unreliable memory and a failing mental-health system across seven narratives.
Book Review
You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters
By Rachel Aviv
Knopf: 240 pages, $30
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New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv has collected seven essays, six originally published in the magazine, under the rubric of mother-daughter stories. But the themes that emerge most forcefully from “You Won’t Get Free of It” transcend those relationships. They involve the slipperiness of truth and the crushing inadequacy of our mental-health system and social safety net.
Most of Aviv’s characters wander through life uneasily, plagued by misdiagnosed, undiagnosable or undertreated maladies. Some are mothers, some daughters, with relationships that can be deeply loving or strained or both. But family alone can’t seem to do much to mitigate, let alone cure, mental illness or the impact of childhood trauma.
Aviv notes in her preface, written expressly for this book, that she has re-reported or reshaped some of the stories, paying more attention to the maternal perspective. “It has been one of the surprises of my life to realize that the child to whom things are done becomes the adult who causes her own injuries,” Aviv writes, an epiphany that won’t seem revelatory to most readers.
Aviv’s journalistic method leans on the idea of unreliable narration. “I’ve always been drawn to stories in which the perspective feels unstable,” she writes. But all the shifts in time and point of view — and the lingering over details, both telling and not — have a downside. These reported essays can feel self-indulgent, slow and overlong.
The obvious gem of the collection is the attention-getting title story, about the Canadian Nobel laureate Alice Munro, who died in 2024 — and whose complex, layered short fiction Aviv admires. “You Won’t Get Free of It” is very long, but, in this case, the length pays off.
Because of the nature of her stories, the revelation that Munro remained with the man who sexually abused her daughter doesn’t just defile the artist, but the art itself.
At its core is a disturbing triangle composed of Munro; her second husband, Gerald Fremlin; and Munro’s daughter Andrea, from her first marriage. In 2005, Fremlin pled guilty to indecent assault for sexually abusing Andrea decades earlier and received a suspended sentence. Munro continued to stand by him, sacrificing her relationship with Andrea.
Aviv didn’t break the story. But, along with graphic descriptions of Fremlin’s predatory behavior, she explores how Munro, a frequent New Yorker contributor, mined both her own difficult childhood and her daughter’s ordeals in her fiction. In Aviv’s view, Munro’s work accumulated power even as her family unraveled and her own unheroic passivity was exposed. “She captures what it feels like to live next to pain and shame without ever looking directly at it,” Aviv writes.
The human personality resists easy analysis — that is surely one of Aviv’s takeaways. But she surfaces a quote by Munro, to a Canadian magazine, that suggests why the writer may have been reluctant to leave her marriage. “I’m really afraid of getting to a stage where one still has sexual feelings but is no longer considered a possible sex object,” Munro says. “That to me is the ultimate horror.”
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By contrast, in a story titled “The Children Stay,” Munro said of the pain of leaving one’s children for a man: “You won’t get free of it, but you won’t die of it.” It’s notable that Aviv uses only the first part of the quote as the essay’s title, shading its meaning.
Aviv employs shifting perspectives memorably in another story, “I Wish I Were Her for You.” Its subject is Hannah Upp, a young teacher prey to dissociative fugue states in which she forgets her own identity. Upp’s first recorded disappearance ends with her improbable recovery, still alive, from the waters near the Statue of Liberty.
Following a second, similar incident, Upp moves to the Caribbean island of St. Thomas to teach at a Montessori school. After she disappears yet again, Aviv accompanies Upp’s mother, herself no stranger to dissociation, as she vainly tracks her missing daughter — and connects instead with other lost women.
The story “Removable Truths” profiles Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist specializing in “the malleability of memory.” Loftus gained notoriety as an expert witness for such widely reviled figures as Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State football coach convicted of child sexual abuse. Looking for Loftus’ motivations, Aviv probes the psychologist’s memories of her mentally ill mother’s probable suicide and her own childhood abuse by a babysitter.
In “God Knows Where I Am,” Linda Bishop, diagnosed variously as having “bipolar disorder with psychosis” or schizoaffective disorder, drifts “between shelters, hospitals, and jail” before finding refuge in a deserted farmhouse. Living only on apples from a nearby orchard, she eventually starves to death. Her daughter, Caitlin, tells Aviv the story — evidence of the tragic fallout of deinstitutionalization, “a nationwide social experiment that did not go as planned.”
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“Second Life” is yet another tale of a woman suffering from severe mental illness. Mary appears to have a form of treatment-resistant schizophrenia, until chemotherapy, following a diagnosis of lymphoma, banishes her psychiatric symptoms. Aviv describes becoming sane as “a kind of narrative collapse, a confrontation with a personal history that is no longer recognizable.”
In “As if They Were My Daughters,” the problem is not illness but global inequality. Aviv reports on Filipina women who move to the United States to work as nannies and send money home to their families. It’s a tale of substitute mothers and daughters, bonding out of both expediency and love, as well as the toll on those left behind.
Individually, these stories aren’t fully satisfying, but perhaps they aren’t meant to be. As the collection makes clear, Aviv prefers restless questioning to closure or complacency.
Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia, has been a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.
