You Won’t Get Free of It

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), of bonds broken and renewed. With uncanny depth of perception, Aviv explores the complexity of this relationship in six essays, five 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 renders 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, about the writer Alice Munro’s family, a daughter’s abuse is erased by her family, only to be recast by her mother 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 this foundational relationship. Illuminating ineffable registers of human experience, Aviv asks piercing questions about how disowned knowledge can form and deform a family and a life.