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

[Rio · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.