Rachel Aviv on Writing About Moms

The people closest to us can sometimes be the hardest to see clearly—and mothers might be the blurriest. “The mother-daughter relationship, perhaps more than any other, seems to defy a fixed point of view,” Rachel Aviv writes in “You Won’t Get Free Of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters.” The book, which came out this week, collects six essays originally published in The New Yorker. “I wrote some of these stories feeling, existentially, like a daughter,” Aviv notes in the book’s preface. She describes revising several essays to “redress what I saw as a kind of imbalance, a defect of curiosity about the mother half of the couple.” We talked about that process, how parent-child attachments can resemble a romance, and what books Aviv turned to while writing the pieces in the collection.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

What inspired you to write this book?

A few years ago, I was rereading interview transcripts for my first ever piece for The New Yorker, “God Knows Where I Am,” which I had written when I was twenty-eight. It was about a woman named Linda Bishop who’d had a psychotic break and ended up living in an abandoned farmhouse subsisting on apples. Revisiting the transcripts in my mid-thirties, I was taken aback when I found that Linda’s best friend had told me that Linda had been pregnant before college, and had given up the baby.

I was amazed that I had not even mentioned this biographical fact in the finished piece. I had essentially described Linda’s psychosis as emerging out of nowhere, after a happy childhood. I called Linda’s sister and asked her about the baby. The question seemed to open up a layer of experience that I had missed.

Did having children yourself change your approach?

There’s becoming a parent, and there’s also the fact of getting older—you no longer identify with the younger person in the room, and you become more aware of the instability of your perspective, as a person and as a journalist.

The Linda Bishop story, it turns out, wasn’t the only time I’d omitted a lost baby. There are two other stories in the book in which parents lose their babies, but when I originally published those pieces I breezed past those events, as if they didn’t merit mention. I somehow hadn’t been curious enough, and in returning to these pieces I tried to slow down and capture that sense of rupture and loss.

In the preface to your collection, you say that your mother was the first subject of your writing. What was it like to write about her again in this book?

I hadn’t been planning to, but while I was thinking about these ideas my mom happened to be moving, and she ended up finding a pile of her own journals from the late seventies and early eighties. When I asked her if I could read them, she immediately said, “Sure!” I felt like I was encountering her with the same sense of freshness and appreciation that I often feel when I am reading the writing of a stranger. I didn’t have to bristle at her idealism, as I might now.