You Won’t Get Free of It by Rachel Aviv review – a subtle study of the mother-daughter bond

Rachel Aviv has a profound interest in the vagaries of human psychology: Strangers to Ourselves, her last book, profiled five people whose psychiatric states resisted straightforward explanation, testing the limits of the mental health system. A Pulitzer finalist, Aviv has become known for rigorous, penetrating journalism that is as empathic as it is insightful. Now comes You Won’t Get Free of It, six stories of mothers and daughters, all originally published in the New Yorker.

Madness runs through this book, too, in the stories of Linda Bishop, a woman who, upon discharge from hospital after a psychotic break, holed up in an abandoned farmhouse and tried to subsist on apples alone, and of Mary, a woman whose delusions and paranoia were only seemingly cured as a side-effect of chemotherapy. It’s also there in the childhood memories of the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus – a professional court witness for those who have been accused of abuse, one of whom was Harvey Weinstein. Loftus’s mother was found drowned, perhaps as a result of suicide. In Aviv’s masterly profile, she teases out a conclusion that leaves you pondering the extent to which this memory expert can rely on her own recollections, and what that says about her particular line of work.

Of the mother representing madness, Marguerite Duras said: “Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met.” Yet there is psychological instability here on the part of daughters, too: Hannah Upp, whose story opens the collection, suffered from fugue states that would lead to her eventual disappearance. Aviv compassionately chronicles her mother’s desperate quest to find her.

In the preface, Aviv writes about her interest in the “hide and seek” dynamic of mother-daughter pairings, and indeed, each of these stories could be said to represent an acting out of that game. What is interesting is that Aviv, too, is a player. “It was as if I had failed to see the drama on the mother’s side, too – her particular longings and humiliations and needs,” she writes, of her own journalism.

Aviv admits to a previous “deficit of curiosity” about mothers. It is admirable how clear-eyed she is about these failures of imagination, which became apparent only after she herself became a mother. In Bishop’s case Aviv neglected to mention, or consider, the possible impact of a baby given up for adoption when Bishop was a young woman. “I had not even asked a follow-up question,” Aviv admits, and you can feel her embarrassment. She has gone back and remedied the “imbalance” for the purposes of this collection, but the discussion itself prompts a fascinating question: to what extent does a woman’s motherhood – or lack thereof – contribute to her perspective as a writer?

It is not a question with an easy answer, not least in the case of novelist Alice Munro. Aviv’s investigation into Munro’s utter failure to protect her daughter, Andrea, from the abuse of her partner, Gerry, is the standout piece here. While it is claimed Munro knew of the abuse, was able to make reference to it in her art (Aviv’s tracing of it through Munro’s writing is meticulous), she chose not to act. That choice – the cowardice of it – and its lifelong repercussions for her daughters may never have come fully to light were it not for the persistence of several journalists, Aviv included. Munro emerges a pathetic figure; I have been unable to read her since.

However our mothers behave, the fact is we will never truly know them. Aviv writes, not entirely comfortably, of how she is essentially living out her own mother’s dream career. The editorial comments she leaves on Aviv’s work – such as a note about caring for a suicidal friend on an article about mental illness – constitute for her daughter a “chronic delusion of reference”. It’s a neat theory – but as a writer whose mother sometimes gives similarly self-reflective feedback, I found myself wondering if what we have here is simply a mother’s insistence that she was, and remains, a person, if her daughter would only care to look.

Reporting from The Guardian contributed to this story.