Alice Munros darkest family drama haunts this New Yorker writer's essay collection
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Set us as preferred Book ReviewYou Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and DaughtersBy Rachel Aviv Knopf: 240 pages, $30If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.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 —...