You Won't Get Free of It

Stories of Mothers and Daughters

By: Rachel Aviv

Narrated by: Andi Arndt

A collection of reported stories that explore the relationship between mothers and daughters, from the finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for her work in The New Yorker.

You Won’t Get Free of It tells the stories of mothers and daughters searching for each other and for themselves. Rachel 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 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 people’s 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 exploration of the competing dynamics of knowing and unknowing, recognition and refusal, that shape our most foundational relationship. Illuminating ineffable registers of experience, Aviv reckons with the way that disowned knowledge forms and deforms families and lives.

Critic reviews

“Recognized for her journalism illuminating the human complexity of mental illness, Aviv returns in You Won’t Get Free of It to six stories she previously published in The New Yorker, revising them with a focus on the mother-daughter connection. . . . Both intellectually and empathetically astute, probing the uneasy complexity of a defining relationship dynamic.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“In this thought-provoking collection of essays, Rachel Aviv explores the complex relationships between mothers and daughters. . . . A compelling, well-written collection.” —Booklist