{"id":174179,"date":"2026-06-30T10:00:42","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T14:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=174179"},"modified":"2026-06-29T13:08:49","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T17:08:49","slug":"rachel-avivs-act-of-revision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/06\/30\/rachel-avivs-act-of-revision\/","title":{"rendered":"Rachel Aviv\u2019s Act of Revision: On You Won\u2019t Get Free of It<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

At a glance, Rachel Aviv\u2019s new book looks like a conventional kind of essay collection: six pieces drawn from more than a decade of writing for <\/span><\/i>The New Yorker<\/span>, framed by a new preface. <\/span><\/i>You Won\u2019t Get Free of It<\/span> gathers some of Aviv\u2019s most celebrated portraits, including those of Hannah Upp, who disappeared three times in nine years during episodes of dissociative fugue, and Andrea Robin Skinner, whose childhood abuse was suppressed within her family even as her mother\u2014the writer Alice Munro\u2014refracted it through fiction.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

But <\/span><\/i>You Won\u2019t Get Free of It<\/span> is not just a greatest-hits compilation. Subtitled <\/span><\/i>Stories of Mothers and Daughters<\/span>,<\/span><\/i> it is also an act of revision. As Aviv notes in the preface, she reported many of the older stories in the book while \u201cfeeling, existentially, like a daughter.\u201d Years later, after having children, she returned to these pieces\u2014newly aware, she writes, of \u201cthe drama on the mother\u2019s side, too.\u201d She revisited her notes to find details she might not have fully grasped as a younger reporter and reinterviewed subjects about facts whose significance she\u2019d missed the first time. <\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

When I reached Aviv by Zoom last month, she was sitting on the floor of her Brooklyn apartment, between a coffee table and a couch. She spoke candidly, but seemed more comfortable tending to the interview than being its subject, even recommending a transcription tool<\/span><\/i>\u2014her instinct, even here, was to smooth the path for the person across from her<\/span><\/i>. We each had a child to collect from school that afternoon, so our hour was bounded by the relationship that her book is about.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

You write in the preface to <\/span>You Won\u2019t Get Free of It<\/span><\/i> that you\u2019re drawn to unstable perspectives. What was it that especially attracted you to the story of Alice Munro and her daughter?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

RACHEL AVIV<\/span><\/p>\n

A very close friend from Toronto read Andrea\u2019s essay in the\u00a0<\/span>Toronto Star<\/span><\/i>,\u00a0an hour or so after it was published, and she texted me, \u201cMaybe you should write about this?\u201d There is no better expression of inhabiting different perspectives about the same events than a family. The same set of facts can look so different through each person\u2019s eyes. On the other hand, it also feels meaningful when the same series of events, through the eyes of two people in the family, whether it\u2019s two siblings, or a married couple, looks exactly the same. It\u2019s a glimpse of how people construct a story of their lives together, sometimes in defensive ways.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I guess it makes sense that Alice Munro would produce three children who could describe their experiences with a similar attention to concrete details, and so their voices carry just as loudly as hers. Sexual abuse can be one of those topics where people start to use the same sorts of language to describe its harm. But Andrea\u2019s words were so specific. She taught me so much about what it feels like to carry the private experience of sexual abuse while everyone else involved seems to move on and profit and thrive.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A central question in that piece was, Why did everyone stay silent? And part of the answer came from Andrea\u2019s sisters, Sheila and Jenny, who talked me through, step by step, their failure to understand. There were certain phases in their lives, certain things they read, that made them grasp anew the depth of the harm they\u2019d done to Andrea over the decades. I felt there was a lot to learn from their ignorance\u2014because it wasn\u2019t ill-intentioned. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

In the preface, you also describe how motherhood changed the lens through which you saw your old writing. When did you start to notice that change?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

AVIV<\/span><\/p>\n

The first seed of it was when I was working on my first book,\u00a0<\/span>Strangers to Ourselves<\/span><\/i>, which deals a lot with the question of psychiatric \u201cinsight.\u201d I decided to reread my notes and transcripts from the first piece I wrote for<\/span>\u00a0The New Yorker<\/span><\/i>, back in 2011, \u201cGod Knows Where I Am.\u201d That piece is about Linda Bishop, who was diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder and psychosis and who starved to death in an empty farmhouse after being released from a New Hampshire psychiatric facility.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I was rereading the transcript of my conversation with Linda\u2019s best friend, and I noticed she said that, as a teenager, Linda had been sent to a maternity home and had given up her newborn. I didn\u2019t see any follow-up questions in the transcript. I was really struck by how, at that age\u2014I was twenty-eight\u2014it just wasn\u2019t that big of a deal to me that a woman carried a baby for nine months, hid away from her community, and then gave up the baby. That this experience would shape her future relationships and subsequent identity as a parent somehow didn’t register for me.<\/span><\/p>\n

I really didn’t notice how many stories engaged with the mother-daughter relationship until the aftermath of the Alice Munro piece. I had thought about turning that piece into a book, but then I also thought, Maybe I\u2019ll write a book with, say, three long pieces about parent-child pairs. Somehow I found myself reading a lot about Anna Freud\u2019s relationship with her father\u2014I was interested in the sexlessness of her life and the way she devoted herself to being a daughter\u2014and I thought about maybe writing a chapter on that, and then a third new chapter. But then I realized that, to some degree, I\u2019d been writing about mother-daughter pairs for the last decade.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When I went back to start re-reporting aspects of the story about Linda for this new book, I remembered that even in the Alice Munro piece, which I\u2019d written as a mother of two kids, I had omitted another dead baby\u2014Munro had had a fourth daughter, who\u2019d died shortly after she was born. Then\u00a0there was another omitted dead baby in a piece I wrote about Hannah Upp, which is the first piece in the book. There was something about that thread \u2026 I had written three\u00a0stories with three\u00a0lost babies, all of which I had left out. I was struck that they hadn\u2019t risen to the level of meriting my attention.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Correct me if I\u2019m wrong, but journalists rarely get to revise their old stories.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

AVIV<\/span><\/p>\n

I was talking about it with Patrick Radden Keefe, and he was like, \u201cWhy are you doing this? As a general rule, I\u2019d say going back and revising old stories is a bad idea.\u201d I usually never let myself look at stories after they\u2019re published, because I know I\u2019ll regret things, but here I was finally giving myself the chance to just dig in. It was almost so pleasurable as to be suspect.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

How did you approach these people with the news that you wanted to reopen these stories that you had written as much as ten years ago?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

AVIV<\/span><\/p>\n

With the Linda Bishop story, I think I just explained straight out to Linda\u2019s sister and her friends that I was shocked I hadn\u2019t asked more questions about Linda\u2019s first pregnancy and that I felt it was because I was too young to really grasp the importance of that part of her life. When I said this to Linda\u2019s sister, Joan, she said something like, \u201cWell, it\u2019s interesting you ask\u201d\u2014and then she explained that she\u2019d learned, years after my story was published, that she and Linda had been adopted. Their parents never told them. And she realized that Linda had given up her baby in the same sort of facility where she had probably been born.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That was the first story I wrote for\u00a0<\/span>The<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span>New Yorker<\/span><\/i>, and at the time I\u2019d been very nervous about timeliness, journalistic newness. So I had framed that story around the diagnosis of anosognosia\u2014which describes a condition where people are unaware of their own illness. It was sort of the \u201chook\u201d for the real story I wanted to tell. Going back to that piece, though, I felt like I could be a little more free and patient with just sort of unfurling the complexities of Linda\u2019s life in ways that I didn\u2019t feel were allowed before.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

How do you tend to choose your subjects? What is it that makes you know that you want to invest in a person\u2019s story?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

AVIV<\/span><\/p>\n

Sometimes it is the way someone speaks. With Hannah Upp, it was similar to what I felt with Andrea, Alice Munro\u2019s daughter\u2014she had a way of speaking about her experiences in a way that made me feel she was doing away with the superficial layer of how we talk about amorphous things like agency and identity. Just the way Hannah spoke about her identity felt revelatory. It might also be the amount of records they\u2019ve kept over a significant period of time, or that I\u2019ll be thinking about how a person\u2019s story intersects with a social issue or institutional problem or moment in history that feels significant. And I also want to write about people who <\/span>want<\/span><\/i> to be engaged in a process of revisiting moments from their lives, because they find it meaningful themselves.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s striking that, across all of your writing, your subjects tend to keep journals and diaries. You have all this interior access.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

AVIV<\/span><\/p>\n

I do find\u2014not always, but sometimes\u2014that people who are composing journals, or other kinds of autobiographical writing, really do write because they want someone to read them. In the best case, there\u2019s a confluence where the person has actually been waiting for someone to read their thoughts and witness what they\u2019ve been through.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Do you worry, for your future reporting, that people will stop keeping those records?\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

AVIV<\/span><\/p>\n

I worry about archives for sure. I\u2019ve done a lot of stories that have been drawn from archives and it\u2019s scary to see how many archives stop at about 1998, when people start emailing.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Do you still keep a diary?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

AVIV<\/span><\/p>\n

Kind of. Over the years, I have written thoughts down in a Scrivener document during emotional or crisis moments. I\u2019ll have a text exchange with a friend that feels very meaningful and then I\u2019ll copy-paste the whole text exchange into the document so that I can remember the advice she shared and the things that I said. I also include lines or passages I\u2019ve read that feel meaningful. So now it\u2019s a little bit more like collage.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

In the new book, you mention\u00a0writers you\u2019ve interviewed\u2014Martha\u00a0Nussbaum, for example\u2014who took pains to ensure that motherhood did not weaken their intellectual identity.\u00a0Were you worried that motherhood would change your identity as a writer?<\/span><\/p>\n

AVIV<\/span><\/p>\n

Before I had my first child, I thought I would basically behave the way I did when I first fell in love as a junior in high school. I really did lose my identity in an insane way. I stopped caring about the things I had previously cared about\u2014friends, sports. I changed the way I looked. It was very scary.\u00a0I imagined motherhood would be like that\u2014that\u00a0I would no longer really care about writing. I don\u2019t know if a part of feeling that way was related to my own mother. There was something about her as a mother that I always saw as, like, unbounded. And I have always felt very bounded. As a young person, for some reason, I put a lot of value on sameness. It was like I thought change was a very dirty and a weak thing to undergo, like once you figure out your identity, you must hold on tightly. That\u2019s\u00a0something\u00a0that motherhood has made me reflect back on almost with\u00a0shame\u2014how\u00a0rigid and afraid I was. Which is not to say that I am not still rigid and afraid! But I do have a lot more imagination about getting to a place where I am not.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

I keep thinking about the Elizabeth Jolley line you quote: \u201cThe strong feeling of love which goes from the parent to the child does not seem part of the child that can be given back to the parent.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

AVIV<\/span><\/p>\n

It’s very strange. A sense of impending rejection or loss has definitely shaped my experience of parenthood. And a fear of feeling invasive and annoying. It is so tangible to me\u2014that I will one day see myself through the eyes of someone who finds me annoying.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

As I read your book, I would sometimes look at my daughter and think, I might be doing things to you that you are going to write about one day. I felt I was watching myself become a character in her future.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

AVIV<\/span><\/p>\n

My friend was describing how her daughter has certain memories of a death in their family\u2014her daughter felt neglected during that time. My friend didn\u2019t think her daughter was actually neglected in practice\u2014observing from close by, I didn\u2019t either\u2014but she was aware that this truth question was sort of irrelevant. Decades later, the story her daughter tells herself about this death may be that she was neglected.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Is it that daughters cannot see themselves as\u00a0characters\u00a0yet?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

AVIV<\/span><\/p>\n

I don’t know. It\u2019s probably so different in each family, but I remember feeling as a daughter that I had too much power\u2014and I definitely did see myself as a \u201ccharacter.\u201d That may have been specific to my family, because my parents were fighting for custody over us, so our behavior and words actually did carry a lot of weight. I would have these separations from my mother\u2014to go on a trip with my dad, for a week or ten days\u2014that felt existential, like sheer drama, where she would tell me to look at the moon at a certain time of night and we\u2019d both say a little prayerlike thing to each other. I\u2019m suddenly remembering that what she told me to say to the moon on at least one trip was \u201cWise woman\u201d or \u201cWise woman squared.\u201d So I would be longing for her and going outside before bed and saying those phrases to the moon.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

What about fathers? Why are they given so little space in the stories you are telling?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

AVIV<\/span><\/p>\n

My husband, when he read the preface, was like, \u201cThanks for writing me out of the story!\u201d I actually have written a fair number of stories about mothers and sons, as well as fathers and sons, but I liked the idea of staying focused on one particular species of relationship, which I find especially complex. There is a particular psychic space that is specific to mothers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the preface to this book, you write that you once found confessional writing \u201chumiliating,\u201d partly because you associated it with what your mother wrote or read. You liken your shift to a more journalistic tone as moving away from your mother\u2019s body heat. What\u2019s your relationship to confessional writing now?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

AVIV<\/span><\/p>\n

I actually do love reading memoirs, so it\u2019s not that I\u2019m not an appreciator of a certain kind of memoir. But I do feel like when I\u2019ve written about myself, I\u2019ve always created rigid containers, so that I can approach my story in a journalistic mode\u2014quoting from medical records, interviewing family members, quoting my mother\u2019s journals, or my own. In the handful of\u00a0<\/span>New Yorker<\/span><\/i> stories where I\u2019ve introduced myself into the piece, I still always have this limiting principle\u2014I will put myself in there only to the degree that my presence lets me illuminate a larger question. I guess that\u2019s how I felt with both books.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

In\u00a0<\/span>Strangers to Ourselves<\/span><\/i>, you write about how your first journal was actually written by your mother. Before you could write, she took dictation, transcribing your thoughts while you were in the hospital with an anorexia diagnosis. In your new book, you describe how your mother urged you to start writing your own diary as a surrogate for her presence. I\u2019m wondering if part of what we\u2019re circling here is your association of writing with being mothered?<\/span><\/p>\n

AVIV<\/span><\/p>\n

I did have a sense of closeness with my mom, and part of that was that she wanted me to be a writer and I took to it. I became her little writer girl. I would share my writing with her and she would encourage me. My friend read the preface and she made this point, which was that, on some level, the experience of boundlessness that I have wanted to avoid repeating as a mother\u00a0also\u00a0benefited\u00a0me as a child.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Have you seen the movie\u00a0<\/span>Janet Planet<\/span><\/i>?<\/span><\/p>\n

AVIV<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes, I have. I loved it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

I ask\u00a0because the film and your new book share a certain scene of leaving a summer camp\u2014the film opens with a young girl calling her mother to say she will kill herself if she doesn\u2019t come pick her up. The mother dutifully comes and gets her. You have the same moment with your mother. After she picks you up, you spend a month together in a cottage, where you both work on your writing.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

AVIV<\/span><\/p>\n

I will just say that when I shared the preface with my editor, Willing Davidson, he wrote in brackets under that paragraph, jokingly, \u201cI didn\u2019t know\u00a0<\/span>Janet Planet\u00a0<\/span><\/i>was based on you!\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Reflecting on this episode, you write that you and your mother both made the wrong choice that summer. Why do you think it was wrong?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

AVIV<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, I didn\u2019t need to threaten suicide.\u00a0I\u00a0have memories of being in that camp\u2014for the first three days before I threatened suicide\u2014and actually having fun and making friends.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My\u00a0mom probably should have told me to give it some time and not reinforce my own sense of myself as very weak. But the strange thing is, after she picked me up, we had this incredible four weeks in her cottage. It felt like our honeymoon or something. She still talks about it, and I still remember it as this weirdly peaceful, glorious time.\u00a0I\u00a0think that was the dynamic that my friend was noticing. There was this warm, nourishing underbelly to things that I may now see as dysfunction.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Stephanie DeGooyer is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the coauthor of <\/em>The Right to Have Rights and the author of <\/em>Before Borders: A Legal and Literary History of Naturalization.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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