You Won’t Get Free of It

by Rachel Aviv, Unknown Author · 2026

In You Won’t Get Free of It, award‑winning journalist Rachel Aviv turns her keen eye to the tangled, often unspoken bond between mothers and daughters. Across seven deeply reported essays—six first appearing in The New Yorker—she follows women who are simultaneously searching for each other and for their own identities. One mother scours the world for a daughter who has vanished; another gives up her own ambitions, working as a nanny to provide for her children. Aviv also revisits a story of a daughter whose trauma is erased by her family, only to be reshaped by her mother, the celebrated writer Alice Munro, into a literary legend. By shifting perspective from daughter to mother, Aviv reveals the hidden longings, humiliations, and fierce love that shape this foundational relationship, offering readers a haunting, intimate portrait of what it means to be bound—and never truly free—by family.