You Won’t Get Free of It

by Rachel Aviv, Unknown Author

Hardcover

About the author

Rachel Aviv joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2013. She has written for the magazine about a range of subjects including medical ethics, criminal justice, education, and homelessness. She was a finalist for the 2018 National Magazine Award for Public Interest for “The Takeover,” a story about elderly people being stripped of their legal rights, and she won the 2015 Scripps Howard Award for “Your Son Is Deceased,” a story on police shootings in Albuquerque. Her writing on mental health was awarded a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship, an Erikson Institute Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and an American Psychoanalytic Association Award for Excellence in Journalism. She has taught courses in narrative medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and the City College of New York. In 2010, she received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. She was a 2019 national fellow at New America.

Reviews

[Jane]

Aviv is a New Yorker writer where many of these non-fiction stories were first published. They all involve relationships between mothers and daughters and involved lengthy reporting by Aviv. The most well known is the story of Alice Munro and how she managed to ignore the sexual abuse that her husband perpetrated against her daughter at the age of nine. It is absolutely shocking and devastating to realize that this Nobel Prize winning author of short stories could have done this, but also confirming of the fact that we never really know another person at the deepest level. The other stories are also fascinating mysteries about human behavior and psychology. All make for riveting reading.

[Rio]

She’s done it again. Another searing, nuanced, compassionate and rigorous journey through mental illness, its aetiologies, its prognoses and its epistemic limits from Rachel Aviv. I devoured this. The essays in this collection, which floats around stories of mothers and daughters, are uncompromising in their depictions, somehow managing to be objective about moral failings without casting total judgement on the perpetrators. Infinitely readable and recommendable.