You Won't Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters

by Rachel Aviv

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.

Genres: Short Stories, Nonfiction, Memoir, Essays

240 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication July 7, 2026

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

[jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished the final essay of this book, on Mother’s Day. It seems fitting to read about Alice Munro’s neglect of her daughter in the wake of sexual abuse, her dismissal of its severity and impact and clinging to of that abuser. I’ll write a full reflection soon… but god.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an e-arc of this collection.

This collection about the relationships between mothers and daughters was fascinating, difficult and carefully written. Much of it also involves mental health, which illuminated things I wasn’t very familiar with. The final piece, and longest, is the titular story which unpacks author Alice Munro’s betrayal of her daughter, in the wake of sexual abuse. This explained the actual truth, more upsetting than I had thought, of what happened and the way the family “dealt” with it. It also mentions some authors (one of which I had no idea but had read their work before) who actually argued for the decriminalization of child sexual abuse.

While this article was the most profound to read in its scope, the rest of the collection was equally moving and important. Fascinating, sad they felt intentional in a way that leaves the reader with a deep recognition of the humanity, however infuriating at times, of mothers and daughters and deep empathy for many of them.

I’m so grateful for what I learned through this collection and will seek out more of this authors work. Despite the subject matter I would definitely recommend this collection to others.

[James B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to Netgalley and Knopf for the ebook. Recently the author wrote a devastating, and complicated, portrayal of the Nobel Prize winning author Alice Munro and the sexual abuse of her youngest daughter by her new husband. This is hidden from Alice for years, but when she is finally told about the abuse, she instantly leaves her husband, only to shortly return. The return causes a giant rift between her three daughters. It’s fascinating to see the arguments and wild justifications that evolve over the years, as Alice even writes versions of the story into her celebrated short stories. That New Yorker profile is paired with six others that deal with complicated mother/daughter issues that devastate in their own ways.

[amber ⊹₊˚₊⊹ · Rating 3 out of 5]

thank you to netgalley and the publisher for this arc!

aptly named, You Won’t Get Free Of It is a complex narrative of mothers and daughters. as having not read the stories in their original format, this book surprised me. I did not anticipate it reading as a mini case-study in an array psychological disorders. some stories do not seem as outright mother/daughter relationship, and more hinge on the mental health aspect overall. however, this is a book that will sit with you and make you consider your own mothers motives and feelings.