Rachel Aviv Revisits Mother-Daughter Stories in New Book 'You Won’t Get Free of It'

Rachel Aviv, a New Yorker writer, has published her second nonfiction book, You Won’t Get Free of It, which collects six stories of mothers and daughters. The book revises her earlier New Yorker pieces, written when she felt "existentially, like a daughter," now re-examined after becoming a mother herself. The subjects include psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, who at 81 has spent her career debunking theories of memory repression and testified for Michael Jackson, Harvey Weinstein, and Ghislaine Maxwell. Another subject is Barbara Bellis, mother of the missing Hannah Upp. The book explores themes of narratorial authority, psychological agency, and the failures of mental healthcare infrastructure. Aviv quotes Yiyun Li and references Simone Weil, Janet Malcolm, and Oliver Sacks. The title echoes her first book, Strangers to Ourselves, and interrogates how identity evolves through dyadic relationships. The book was published by Knopf.