Writer Rachel Aviv explores the complexity of the mother-daughter bond

**Tonya Mosley** (0:00)
This is Fresh Air, I'm Tonya Mosley. In 1980, a young woman sat down at her typewriter while her baby slept and tried to become a writer. She wanted to write something that mattered, a Madame Bovary. Instead, most days, she folded laundry or fell asleep. That woman was my guest's mother, writer Rachel Aviv, who would grow up to become a writer herself for The New Yorker.
Aviv's new book is a collection of stories about mothers and daughters. She first wrote them for The New Yorker, a young teacher who experienced a mysterious condition that caused her to forget who she was, disappearing for days at a time. A Filipino woman who left her nine children to raise someone else's in the US.
When she wrote them the first time, Aviv identified with the daughters without quite realizing it. Then she became a mother herself, went back and saw how much of the mother she'd missed. The book is called You Won't Get Free of It, Stories of Mothers and Daughters. Rachel Aviv is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes about medicine, mental illness, and criminal justice. She won a National Magazine Award for her profiles, and this year she was a Pulitzer finalist for a story about patients misdiagnosed with schizophrenia who turn out to have a treatable autoimmune disease. The New York Times named her first book, Strangers to Ourselves, one of the best books of 2022
Rachel Aviv, welcome to Fresh Air.

**Rachel Aviv** (1:30)
Thanks so much for having me.

**Tonya Mosley** (1:32)
Thank you for writing this book. I really enjoyed it, and I want to start off our conversation by having you read from the preface of the book, because the very personal and journalistic turn you've taken, you really lay out here toward a mother's point of view. Can I have you read that excerpt?

**Rachel Aviv** (1:50)
Yeah. The novelist Yiyun Li writes that the essence of growing up is to play hide and seek with one's mother successfully. In this book, I have chosen stories, originally published in the New Yorker, of mother-child pairs acting out this game.
I wrote some of these stories feeling existentially like a daughter, and now I have returned to them with a different identification. It was as if I had failed to see the drama on the mother side, too, her particular longings and humiliations and needs.

**Tonya Mosley** (2:26)
Thank you so much. I wanted you to read that short excerpt because I think it really encapsulates what you've done here. And what's so fascinating to me is you wrote most of these stories before you had children, and then you returned to them after.
When did you first notice it changing the way you read your own work, that new experience identity of being a mother?

**Rachel Aviv** (2:50)
I was re-reading the first piece I had written for the New Yorker when I was 28 And I was re-reading it because for my last book, I was writing about sort of issues related to psychiatric insight and the first story I wrote for the New Yorker really dealt with those issues. So I just wanted to re-read my notes and sort of see what kind of information I had been collecting at that time. And as I was reading my interview notes, I noticed that the story is about a woman named Linda Bishop who refuses psychiatric care in a psychiatric hospital in New Hampshire, leaves the hospital, and ends up sort of subsisting on apples in an abandoned farmhouse. And in the story, I remember I had described her mental illness as sort of emerging out of nowhere after a happy, harmonious childhood. And when I was re-reading my notes, I was struck that a friend of Linda's had told me that she had given up a baby for adoption when she was in her late teens. And I was amazed that I just had not mentioned that in the piece, that that detail had not registered as an important life event.
So that was the first moment that I became just aware of kind of the instability of my own authority in a way, or sort of how much my life experience was shaping the kind of questions I was asking and the curiosities I had.

**Tonya Mosley** (4:27)
I actually want to talk about the first story. So it's about a young woman named Hannah Up. And for people who don't know her, tell us who she was and this mysterious condition she had, this associative fugue state.

**Rachel Aviv** (4:41)
Hannah was a teacher in Harlem in 2008, a very loved person. She had many, many friends. And one day she disappeared, essentially. And her roommates realized she'd been gone for five days, and they called the police. And the police began searching for her throughout Manhattan. And no one could find her. And it became a kind of New York City news story, where everyone was searching for this young teacher. And after three weeks, she surfaced in the water of the Hudson River.