Writer Rachel Aviv explores the complexity of the mother-daughter bond

Summary

FRESH AIR | July 6, 2026
Episode: Writer Rachel Aviv Explores the Complexity of the Mother-Daughter Bond
Host: Tonya Mosley
Guest: Rachel Aviv, Staff Writer, The New Yorker
Book: You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Tonya Mosley speaks with acclaimed journalist and writer Rachel Aviv about her new book, You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters. Aviv, whose reporting often delves into the intersections of mental health, medicine, and personal identity, discusses the nuances of the mother-daughter relationship through reportage, personal experience, and the reconsideration of her own work after becoming a mother herself. The episode explores questions of memory, trauma, generational inheritance, self-actualization, and the ethical quandaries faced by mothers balancing ambition, personal fulfillment, and caregiving.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Aviv’s Shift in Perspective: Writing as a Daughter, Editing as a Mother

[02:09–04:46]

• Aviv reads from her book's preface, highlighting a quote: “The novelist Yiyun Li writes that the essence of growing up is to play hide and seek with one’s mother successfully” ([02:09]).
• Aviv shares how her early work for The New Yorker, written before motherhood, centered on daughters. After becoming a mother, she saw what she had previously missed about the mothers—“It was as if I had failed to see the drama on the mother’s side, too, her particular longings and humiliations and needs.” ([02:34]; read at [02:09])
• Revisiting her piece about Linda Bishop, Aviv is struck by her initial omission of Bishop’s giving up a baby for adoption—a detail that, post-motherhood, feels pivotal:

  “I was amazed that I just had not mentioned that...That was the first moment I became just aware of ... how much my life experience was shaping the kind of questions I was asking.” ([04:08])

Story 1: Hannah Upp and the Mysteries of Dissociative Fugue

[04:46–11:21]

• Mosley and Aviv discuss the story of Hannah Upp, a beloved teacher who vanished due to dissociative fugue, a rare form of memory loss. Aviv outlines the skepticism around these conditions (“...the field wasn’t really able to preserve the aspects of dissociation that were enduring...it does have that sort of mystical whiff.” [06:58])
• Aviv explains she initially omitted that Hannah’s mother, Barbara, lost a baby shortly before Hannah’s birth, and that Hannah’s fugues coincided with that baby’s birthday. Aviv resisted this as “too sentimental or...cliché,” but came to accept its resonance as a family myth—even as a potentially unconscious source of cyclical trauma ([08:29–10:17]).
• Quote:

  “It felt like the umbilical cord was still there on some level...you cannot separate the mother’s cycles and traumas from the daughter’s way of moving through the world.” ([10:33])

Story 2: Alice Munro’s Legacy and Estrangement

[11:21–19:32]

• Aviv recounts reporting on Nobel-winning author Alice Munro, whose daughter, Andrea Skinner, was sexually abused by Munro’s husband and later estranged from her mother. Munro acknowledged the abuse privately but prioritized her literary identity, saying,

  “I have traded my daughter for my career and my art.” ([14:05])

• Aviv finds Munro’s actions “even more cold than I had expected...it wasn’t that I was finding justifications...it was actually even more cold.” ([18:47])
• The episode wrestles with the contradiction between aesthetics and morality:

  “...the work got better. Like, it was more complex...It wasn’t better morally, but aesthetically, maybe it was.” ([17:47])

• Mosley asks how Aviv reconciles Munro’s artistic greatness with her personal failings. Aviv responds,

  “I guess you don’t read writing because the person is good.” ([17:49])

Story 3: The Global Cost of Motherhood—Emma and the Children Left Behind

[22:59–27:18]

• Emma, a Filipino mother of nine, leaves her children to work as a nanny in New York and support them from afar:

  “I was amazed to see how kind of casually and how normal it had become that they were going years, even decades, without seeing their children...” ([22:59])

• The emotional toll is described as “displacement”—Emma redirects maternal love to her American charges, while her biological children feel abandoned and jealous ([24:26]). The essay’s new ending dwells on the fantasy of reunion, exploring both its allure and its increasing abstraction over time ([25:55]).

The Tension Between Motherhood and Self-Actualization

[27:18–30:32]

• Aviv identifies a motif across her essays: “these mothers reaching towards self actualization of being a person outside of being a mother, and the challenges, the cost of that.” ([27:18])
• Aviv recalls how, before motherhood, she romanticized the idea of “remaining unchanged” after becoming a parent, but later acknowledges “holding onto sameness feels like the behavior of someone who is frightened.” ([29:10])

Personal Reflection: Childhood Anorexia and the Language of Distress

[31:23–36:47]

• Mosley prompts Aviv to discuss her own childhood experience with anorexia, and how being the youngest ever hospitalized child for the disorder influenced her approach to narrative, psychology, and therapeutic insight:

  “...it taught me a certain way of talking about the mind...not assuming that the surface layer of behavior is true...there are conflicted feelings.” ([35:42])

On the Challenge and Necessity of Difficult Stories

[37:21–40:33]

• Aviv discusses the complexity of narrating mental illness and trauma, cautioning against formulaic or binary portrayals:

  “...complicated stories that hold different viewpoints...are something to hold onto and that feel at risk...I don’t want to write stories where I know the answer from the beginning.” ([39:20])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The novelist Yiyun Li writes that the essence of growing up is to play hide and seek with one's mother successfully.” —Rachel Aviv, [02:09]
• “It was as if I had failed to see the drama on the mother’s side, too, her particular longings and humiliations and needs.” —Rachel Aviv, [02:34]
• “I have traded my daughter for my career and my art.” —Alice Munro, as paraphrased by Aviv, [14:05]
• “The work got better. Like, it was more complex. It wasn't better morally, but aesthetically, maybe it was.” —Rachel Aviv, [17:47]
• “You don't read writing because the person is good.” —Rachel Aviv, [17:49]
• “I was amazed to see how casually and how normal it had become that they were going years, even decades, without seeing their children.” —Rachel Aviv, on Filipino nannies, [22:59]
• “Holding onto sameness feels like the behavior of someone who is frightened.” —Rachel Aviv, [29:10]
• “I think not eating is like the most profound way to separate yourself.... Asserting your own boundaries.” —Rachel Aviv, on childhood anorexia, [34:25]
• “It taught me a certain way of talking about the mind ... not assuming that the surface layer of behavior is true.” —Rachel Aviv, [35:42]
• “I don’t want to write stories where I know the answer from the beginning or where I know what the argument is going to be. I like to really feel uncertain until the piece is done.” —Rachel Aviv, [40:12]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Aviv reads from her preface: [02:09]
• First realization as a new mother/editor: [03:09]–[04:46]
• Discussion of Hannah Upp and dissociative fugue: [05:00]–[11:21]
• Alice Munro’s family trauma and legacy: [11:21]–[19:32]
• Filipino “transnational mothers” and displacement: [22:59]–[27:18]
• Mothers vs. self-actualization; romanticizing “sameness”: [27:18]–[30:32]
• Child anorexia story, therapy, and narrative framing: [31:23]–[36:47]
• Language for mental illness & complexity in journalism: [37:21]–[40:33]
• Final thoughts on storytelling and uncertainty: [40:33]

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Episode Takeaways

Rachel Aviv’s conversation with Tonya Mosley offers an intimate and intellectually rigorous journey through the often unspoken complexities of motherhood, daughterhood, and the stories we tell about them. The episode moves fluidly from narrative ethics and journalistic self-reflection to global migration, trauma, and the psychology of identity. Aviv’s candor about her own blind spots and evolving perspective gives much needed nuance to the now-politicized and often “oversimplified” discourse on parenting, trauma, and gender.

For readers and listeners alike, Aviv’s stories—both reported and personal—ask us to reckon with ambiguity, to look beyond neat explanations and to find meaning in the messy, recurring patterns of human relationships.

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Rachel Aviv’s book, You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, is available now.

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Transcript

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[Tanya Mosley]

Learn [e-mail] this is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Moseley. In 1980, a young woman sat down at her typewriter while her baby slept and tried to become a writer. She wanted to write something that mattered, a Madame Bovary. Instead, most days she folded laundry or fell asleep. That woman was my guest's mother, writer Rachel Aviv, who would grow up to become a writer herself for the New Yorker. Aviv's new book is a collection of stories about mothers and daughters. She first wrote them for the New Yorker. A young teacher who experienced a mysterious condition that caused her to forget who she was, disappearing for days at a time. A Filipino woman who left her nine children to raise someone else's in the US when she wrote them the first time, Aviv identified with the daughters without quite realizing it. Then she became a mother herself, went back and saw how much of the mother she'd missed. The book is called you Won't Get Free of Stories of Mothers and Daughters. Rachel Leviv is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where she writes about medicine, mental illness and criminal justice. She won a National Magazine Award for her profile, and this year she was a Pulitzer finalist for a story about patients misdiagnosed with schizophrenia who turn out to have a treatable autoimmune disease. The New York Times named her first book Strangers to Ourselves, one of the best books of 2022. Rachel Leviev, welcome to FRESH AIR.

[Rachel Aviv]

Thanks so much for having me.

[Tanya Mosley]

Thank you for writing this book. I really enjoyed it. And I want to start off our conversation by having you read from the preface of the book the very personal and journalistic turn you've taken. You really lay out here toward a mother's point of view. Can I have you read that excerpt?

[Rachel Aviv]

Yeah. The novelist Yi Yeon Lee writes that the essence of growing up is to play hide and seek with one's mother successfully. In this book, I have chosen stories, originally published in the New Yorker, of mother child pairs acting out this game. I wrote some of these stories feeling existentially like a daughter, and now I have returned to them with a different identification. It was as if I had failed to see the drama on the mother's side, too, her particular longings and humiliations and needs.

[Tanya Mosley]

Thank you so much. I wanted you to read that short excerpt because I think it really encapsulates what you've done here. And what's so fascinating to me is you wrote most of these stories before you had children, and then you returned to them after. When did you first notice it changing the way you read your own work, that new experience, identity of being a mother?

[Rachel Aviv]

I was rereading the first piece I had written for the New Yorker when I was 28. And I was rereading it because for my last book, I was writing about sort of issues related to psychiatric insight. And the first story I wrote for the New Yorker really dealt with those issues. So I just wanted to reread my notes and sort of see what kind of information I had been collecting at that time. And as I was reading my interview notes, I noticed that the story is about a woman named Linda Bishop who refuses psychiatric care in a psychiatric hospital in New Hampshire, leaves the hospital and ends up sort of subsisting on apples in an abandoned farmhouse. And in the story I remember, had described her. Her mental illness as sort of emerging out of nowhere after a happy, harmonious childhood. And when I was rereading my notes, I was struck that a friend of Linda's had told me that she had given up a baby for adoption when she was in her late teens. And I was amazed that I just had not mentioned that in the piece, that that detail had not reg as an important life event. So that was the first moment that I became just aware of kind of the instability of my own authority in a way or sort of how much my life experience was shaping the kind of questions I was asking and the curiosities I had.

[Tanya Mosley]

I actually wanna talk about the first story. So it's about a young woman named Hannah Upp. And for people who don't know her, tell us who she was and this mysterious condition. Associative fugue state.

[Rachel Aviv]

Hannah was a teacher in Harlem in 2008. A very loved person. She had many, many friends. And one day she disappeared, essentially. And her roommates realized she'd been gone for five days. And they called the police. And the police began searching for her throughout Manhattan, and no one could find her. And it became a kind of New York City news story where everyone was searching for this young teacher. And after three weeks, she surfaced in the water of the Hudson River. And she had no memory of what she'd been doing or where she was, or even no understanding that three weeks had passed. She was eventually diagnosed with disassociative Fugue, which is a really rare species of disassociation. Where people kind of embark on these long journeys and lose access to their personal history. And sometimes they kind of emerge after months or years and don't know why. They have sort of assumed a new name and a new job and a new home. And over the course of 10 years, she had two more fugues in which she disappeared. I started writing about her when she had disappeared for the third time. And that was in St. Thomas. And after that third fugue, she was never found.

[Tanya Mosley]

I mean, this condition is astounding, this disassociative fugue state. It's rare, but it happens. Is this another? You know, back in the 80s and the 90s, there was a preoccupation with amnesia and people leaving their lives and then showing up somewhere else as someone else and not having any understanding of, like, who they were prior. And that trauma is what typically caused it. This is kind of like a definitive diagnosis for something like that.

[Rachel Aviv]

Yeah. And I think it's really compromised by that era in the 80s and the 90s, in which people were recovering memories of abuse. And later it was sort of understood that these memories were often unreliable. And that it was a sort of moment of hysteria. And I think disassociation in general, like, got a bad reputation because of that. And the field wasn't really able to kind of preserve the aspects of disassociation that were sort of enduring and didn't relate to that particular cultural moment. That that was sort of disassociation manifesting as this almost like, cultural syndrome. But disassociation has always existed and been observed. And I think psychiatrists have been kind of tentative in part because it does have that sort of mystical whiff.

[Tanya Mosley]

There is a detail that you left out of the first essay. It is also about the loss of a baby. So before Hannah was born, her mother, Barbara, had given birth to a baby too early, and that baby only lived a day. And Hannah's disappearances kept happening around that baby's birthday. And now you cut that out the first time in that first essay because you felt it symbolic. What made you trust it the second time?

[Rachel Aviv]

You know, I think there was some feeling that it felt too sentimental or, like, almost a cliche. And I think on one level, I feel like this sort of grudging acceptance that there's a reason cliches become cliches. They like, they're real. On the other hand, I think it almost felt like it couldn't be true. And I think maybe one of the Things that I was interested in when I went back to it was the way that it didn't really matter, like how true it was the first time. But then it sort of installs itself as this family myth. And the story that Hannah has these fugues at the same time of year as her mother's lost baby does sort of work on the people, you know, it works on Hannah, it works on her mother, and maybe then it influences it in its own way.

[Tanya Mosley]

Just to make a point of clarity, the mother, Barbara, held this as a belief for herself that every time my daughter Hannah disappears, it's around my first baby's birthday. So she took meaning into this.

[Rachel Aviv]

So, right. Like, how much did Hannah absorb about that fact? Or was she responding to her mother becoming depressed at that time of year? Or, you know, maybe her mother had been feeling depressed always around that time of year, which would completely make sense. And Hannah grew up with a particular sort of mood around that time of year, which then influenced her own cycle. There are so many ways in which that can sort of filter into the family life and the family narrative, even if it wasn't explicit.

[Tanya Mosley]

What does that tell you about the deep connections between mothers and daughters? Because on one hand, journalistically, I could see why you would cut that out. I mean, I think a journalist might think it's too much of a coincidence or it's kind of woo woo, this idea that there's some sort of psychic connection there.

[Rachel Aviv]

Yes.

[Tanya Mosley]

You know.

[Rachel Aviv]

Yes, I think that's what it was. Thank you for saying that. I think it felt too mystical to woo woo. And it felt like the umbilical cord was still there on some level like that. You cannot separate the mother's sort of cycles and traumas from the daughter's way of moving through the world. And it felt like by whatever chain of response it was occurring, it had been sort of absorbed by Hannah on some level. And whether it was a coincidence or not, didn't feel that meaningful because it had become a story that the family told and that acted on both mother and daughter.

[Tanya Mosley]

Let's talk a little bit about Alice Monroe. It is the last story in your book. You know, Alice Monroe is such a highly regarded writer, she's a Nobel Prize winning writer. Can you briefly tell us what came out about her for those that don't know and what you ended up writing about her?

[Rachel Aviv]

So in July 2024, there was an article in the Toronto Star about how Alice Munro's daughter, Andrea Skinner, had been sexually abused by Alice Munro's husband, Jerry Fremlin. And Alice Monroe had kept that. Sort of never sufficiently acknowledged it to the degree that her daughter Andrea was estranged and could no longer sort of bear to be in her presence.

[Tanya Mosley]

Monroe, she didn't just look away from her daughter, though. I mean, she used it. The abuse goes into the fiction. One of her daughters, Ginny, has this devastating phrase that her mother put everything through a quote machine that turns things into gold. Can you talk a little bit for a moment what this had done to Andrea, what you found as you interviewed her and delved into this story that really spanned decades.

[Rachel Aviv]

So Andrea was sort of a fan of her mother's writing. She was proud of her mother's writing. And there were some stories that were transparently about a sexualized daughter who is in pain and sort of sacrificed. And at first, Andrea felt, oh, this is great. My mother is dealing with it. She's processing it. And as time went on and Alice Monroe continued to write about it in various ways, Andrea saw that she wasn't actually processing it. She was using it. She was, like, turning it into amazing art, but wasn't like it went one way. It was sort of channeling outward towards the work and not back inward towards her own understanding of what Andrea was experiencing. It was this incredible act of, like, disassociation in a way, where she could play with the ideas as if they were just sort of interesting themes. And yet these were the themes that, for Andrea, had sort of destroyed her young adulthood and childhood.

[Tanya Mosley]

What was the most disturbing part of this story for you?

[Rachel Aviv]

There was one audio recording between Alice Munro and her biographer, and her biography did not mention the sexual abuse at all. And she had asked for a meeting at a diner with her biographer, and he recorded it, but he didn't use it. And she basically said, yes, my husband sexually abused Andrea. It's awful, but I will be destroyed if anyone knows. It will become who I am. I've worked so hard to be who I am, and I can't give that up. And it was just so stark. And there was no excuse she was even offering. It was just that it was like, I have traded my daughter for my career and my art.

[Tanya Mosley]

This actually went to court. He pleaded guilty to the sex abuse. And there is a moment where she. Alice actually says her fear is that this would sort of take over her career. That if people knew that she was with a man who abused a daughter, like, she wouldn't want this to cloud the story of her life. Well, she passes away and, I mean, it has become the story that is her life. And Your story is a big part of that. How have you thought about that? When you think about her entire decision making was wrapped around her career and the perception around herself at the cost of her, namely her daughter, Andrea.

[Rachel Aviv]

I was thinking about the quote, you won't get free of it, which is a quote from one of her short stories where she describes a mother who has abandoned her children for a man. And I think the era in which she was working was important. Like, it was very rare for a woman to leave a man and sort of pursue her career and.

[Tanya Mosley]

Cause we're talking about the 70s, right?

[Rachel Aviv]

Right. So what she was doing felt new and felt brave. And in a way, it was almost as if in the spirit of feminism or whatever, she felt she was justified in freeing herself from the burden of her daughter's abuse. And I was just struck, you know, that she felt she would not get free of that abandonment of a child, or she articulated that in a story, and that has become her legacy, that she is not free of the way that she abandoned her daughter.

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[Tanya Mosley]

As a short story writer, were you yourself a fan of Alice Munro's writing?

[Rachel Aviv]

It was interesting. I've written about artists or writers who have done things that really complicate their legacy or their work, and I did find myself feeling more respect for Alice Munro's sort of craft and writing. And the stories were not fading for me. They were incredible, like works of art for me. It was like. It felt like the moral universe is such that you would think that there should be some sort of shift in her career in her writing, and she'd be, like, punished aesthetically for turning her daughter's abuse into art. But the strange thing was, the work got better. Like, it was more complex. It was more fraught and tense and sort of written from multiple perspectives. It wasn't better morally, but aesthetically, maybe it was.

[Tanya Mosley]

How do you sit with that?

[Rachel Aviv]

I guess you don't read writing because the person is good. I don't know. I think I was less interested when I was writing the piece about sort of what to do with her legacy, like what to do with sort of the bad artist or the monster artist, and just more interested in how the monstrous acts sort of was converted into this new form that she almost created.

[Tanya Mosley]

What had been the feedback, though, especially from maybe feminist writers, those who kind of held her to an extremely high esteem. You know, she won the Nobel Prize, which speaks to something greater about a person's character, not only just the writing, but, you know, who they are is embedded in their writing, in a way that we hail, we see as, like aspirational. Did you receive any feedback from your writing the first time it published?

[Rachel Aviv]

I think the initial news of Alice Munro's silencing of the abuse was the moment when a lot of people who had seen her as this feminist icon felt a real sense of tragedy and almost heartbreak. And I was upset to find that as I reported the story, what else Monroe had done seemed, in a way worse than I had expected. Like, it wasn't that I was finding justifications and sort of reasons. It was actually even more cold than I had expected.

[Tanya Mosley]

Her reaction to her daughter being abused.

[Rachel Aviv]

Yeah, it felt quite cold. And yet her two other daughters, like, just felt that she unconditionally loved them. I didn't doubt at all that her other two daughters felt that love. And yet Andrea felt her mother had been totally stony toward her. And it was moving and sort of tragic to understand that Monroe had had her own childhood experiences of abuse and sort of had conditioned herself to deal with it in this very compartmentalized way where she could not allow it to have been something like truly hard in her life. She kind of dismissed it, at least in conversation, I think in writing. She allowed it to assume its proper proportions in a way. But then she sort of repeated that with her daughter, where she was sort of like, aren't you over this already? Like, couldn't understand that this was still the defining trauma for Andrea's life.

[Tanya Mosley]

Our guest today is writer Rachel Aviv from the New Yorker. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley and this is FRESH air.

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[Embedded Podcast Host]

The fatal shooting of a teenager at a protest in Seattle has gone unsolved for six years.

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[Rachel Aviv]

How are there no answers?

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[Rachel Aviv]

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[NPR Announcer]

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[Tanya Mosley]

This is FRESH air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is Rachel Aviv, a staff writer at the New Yorker who writes about the places where the mind, medicine and the law collide. She won a National Magazine Award for her profiles, and this year she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for a story about patients misdiagnosed with schizophrenia who turn out to have a treatable autoimmune dise. Her first book, strangers to Ourselves, was one of the best books of 2022 on several lists, including the New York Times. Her new one is a collection of essays called you'd Won't Get Free of Stories of Mothers and Daughters. I do want to ask you about a mother and daughter bond that spans the ocean. It's about this woman named Emma. In your essay, as if they were my Daughters, tell us who Emma is.

[Rachel Aviv]

I met Emma at a advocacy organization for Filipino domestic workers. Emma had come from the Philippines. She had nine daughters, and she could no longer support them. So she moved to New York City and she became a nanny for other people's children. And when I met her and some of her friends, I was amazed to see how kind of casually and how normal it had become that they were going years, even decades, without seeing their children. They had made this incredible sacrifice that in order to support their own children and to allow them to live full lives, they needed to abandon them essentially and come to America and take care of other people's children.

[Tanya Mosley]

This is a phenomenon that's just heartbreaking. And Emma kept this notebook of the books that she loved, and then she would mail them to her daughter in the Philippines, Roxanne, to read to her grandson. And there's a thing that Emma had to do herself to survive this job. She had to kind of like transfer her love for her own children onto the children that she was taking care of. She calls it displacement. And could you just talk a little bit about what that displacement looked like?

[Rachel Aviv]

I mean, she became like a surrogate mother for these other children. And she also found herself with so much more time to kind of shower them with attention and sort of educational goods. So her children were like, well, you know, why did you never read us books? Why are you reading this other child books? And her children really struggled with holding these two facts, one of which was that their mother went to America because she wanted the best for them. And the second was that their mother was building A new life away from them. And they had no contact with her except through Facebook. And so they couldn't help but feel jealous of these sort of American toddlers who were receiving their mother's love.

[Tanya Mosley]

Hmm. When this essay first ran, you called it the Cost of Caring. That was the title. And then you renamed it as if they were my daughters, which speaks to this thing, of this displaced love towards these children that she's caring for. And you also. You changed the ending a bit.

[Rachel Aviv]

Yeah.

[Tanya Mosley]

So what did. Not only renaming it, but like, re ending it? What did that let you see that you couldn't see the first time or you saw, but like, you omit it for the first time?

[Rachel Aviv]

I think the way I rewrote it was thinking about the kind of fantasy of reunion. It was about Emma's desire to reunite with her children and her children's desire to reunite with her. And they had this fantasy of what that would be like. And there was a way in which I was sort of thinking about it as more of a universal fantasy, that there is this, like, space of safety and being held and cared for that everyone holds as this, like, almost primitive fantasy. And I think I was aware of how unreachable it was in Emma's life, both because she didn't plan to come back home, and also this strange thing happened where she felt like she was self actualizing, like she actually was enjoying herself, she was making friends, and she didn't know that she wanted to go back to the old life and her children didn't know anymore what it even felt like to be in a physical space of their mother. So this idea of the reunion became more and more abstract and sort of fantastical. And I think I wanted to capture that more and to end on that note, because it felt continuous with sort of many of the other hopes or fantasies in the other pieces.

[Tanya Mosley]

I see the thread in a few of the essays of, like, these mothers reaching towards self actualization of being a person outside of being a mother, and the challenges, the cost of that. You know, it's an old story, but it's not one that like, we talk about in contemporary times, because now we kind of have this falsehood that, like, you can have it all, you know?

[Rachel Aviv]

Yeah. In the beginning of the book, I talk about how I noticed that two pieces I'd written had almost the same scene. One was about the philosopher Martha Nussbaum. The other was about the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus. And somehow I had written paragraphs that were very similar that were both about how they were either giving birth to a baby or trying to get pregnant. And they refused to step away from their work. Like, they. Martha Nussbaum brought philosophy texts to read so she could sort of prove to everyone that she had not changed, that she was sort of still the same hard working star that she'd always been. I think what I was struck by was how much I was sort of romanticizing that idea that, like, you become a mother and you remain, like, stoically the same. And I don't know why that was such a value, but it was. And I remember I had my editor at the New Yorker was like, you're not actually that happy now. Why are you trying to stay the same? And I remember thinking that was a really good point, but, like, it wasn't also, it wasn't penetrating me.

[Tanya Mosley]

Can you kind of talk a little bit about what you were thinking before you became a mother and then how your thinking kind of evolved from this binary, overblown way of thinking?

[Rachel Aviv]

There's a really good book called Transformative Experiences by the philosopher L A Paul. And I remember reading that when I was pregnant. And it's kind of about how you cannot possibly make a decision to have a child that is rational because the conditions of your life and your understanding of values will change so radically that, like, it sort of explodes the idea of a reasoned decision. And she compares it to the decision to become a vampire. I think I found that, like, incredibly frightening, maybe because, like, I had spent so much time as a young adult, like, feeling like I needed to establish this identity and then kind of cling to it nervously. Yeah, I guess I look back on that and it's not that I feel I'm so changed. I probably wish I were changed more. But I. But I do think. I do think that sort of holding onto sameness feels like the behavior of someone who is frightened. And I would love to know what Martha Nussbaum and Elizabeth Loftus think now about what they were doing during birth. Like, at the time I kind of glorified it or romanticized it. And I would like, they're both, you know, in their 70s or 80s. I would like to know if they think they were too brittle and that they were too afraid of change and that they didn't realize how long life actually was.

[Tanya Mosley]

Mm. If you're just joining us, my guest today is writer Rachel Aviv from the New Yorker. Her new essay collection is called you'd Won't Get Free of Stories of Mothers and Daughters. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is fresh air.

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[Tanya Mosley]

Of all the protests in the summer of 2020, for a moment there, it was utopia. One took a unique turn.

[Rachel Aviv]

Somebody over the age of 18 know

[Tanya Mosley]

how to use a gun. This is the story of how violence came to occupy an anti violence occupation in Seattle. Listen to We Keep Us Safe, a new true crime series on the Embedded podcast from npr. This is FRESH air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and today I'm talking with New Yorker writer Rachel Aviva. Her new book, youk Won't Get Free of It, gathers seven stories of mothers and daughters essays she first reported for the magazine. I want to talk about something that you wrote about in the preface of your first book, strangers to Ourselves, and it is about when you were six and you stopped eating and you were six years old. So you had never really heard the word anorexia but became, they told you later, the youngest child ever hospitalized for it. Can you tell me what you what you remember most about that time in your life?

[Rachel Aviv]

I remember the children that I was with. It was sort of this old school, like anorexia ward where I was surrounded by older, slightly older girls. Like 12 felt old to me because I was 6. And I remember learning from them and understanding what anorexia was not because I was sort of bringing the palette of symptoms to the table, but because they were telling me things like, you know, you're supposed to exercise, that's how you burn calories or like do jumping jacks, look at your stomach, these things. And it was such a strange kind of competitive environment in which girls who all had some form of related distress were put together and then began to express that distress in increasingly similar ways.

[Tanya Mosley]

And you're learning from each other. You're learning these bad habits from each other.

[Rachel Aviv]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Tanya Mosley]

Can you, can you talk just a little bit about what, what you remember about yourself when you stopped eating and what, what you were telling yourself about, about not eating?

[Rachel Aviv]

I think I felt very proud of myself. Like I had done this very this like severe act of self discipline and that there was something like Noble. And it was proof of my sort of strong individuality. So I think I knew it was bothering everyone, but I must have felt like on some level they secretly respected it because I think that's how I felt about myself for a while. That, like, I had shown how strong I was.

[Tanya Mosley]

Do you remember what you were responding to?

[Rachel Aviv]

Well, it's hard because, you know, I. I had like, child therapy and. And there were theories floated then that I have now taken as my own. But I think, yeah, I think not eating is like the most profound way to separate yourself. Well, actually, I mean, that comes from my therapist. I remember her saying as a child that, like. And it was overwrought and she was like this, trained as a psychoanalyst. But I was sick, so it was sort of ill fitting. But I remember her saying, like, the mother symbolizes milk and you're rejecting the mother being sort of asserting your own boundaries. And I don't know about the milk part, but that has some resonance.

[Tanya Mosley]

You write about this. It's the preface of the book. So it's just the way for us to enter then these stories about mental health and mental illness. And in the same way that you do this with the story of you and your mother for this latest book. But I wondered how that experience shaped your interests in these underexplored but also pretty complicated stories, because you don't really shy away from stories that don't give a clean, you know, narrative.

[Rachel Aviv]

I often think, I mean, I. After I was released from the hospital after six weeks, I was required to go to therapy three times a week. So that was from first grade to fifth grade, like three times a week, 45 minutes each, sort of psychoanalytic therapy. And I have no idea whether that was sort of emotionally useful, but I do feel like intellectually it was useful in some way. Like it taught me a certain way of talking about the mind and thinking about the mind and not assuming that the surface layer of behavior is true or sort of always, like, feeling that there is something underneath that surface layer or that there are conflicted feelings. It just gave me a different kind of language for appreciating, like, how. How complex people's minds are. So I sometimes think that those five years of therapy, which I found like, humiliating and invasive, really shaped the way I think about people.

[Tanya Mosley]

Because so much of your writing, it kind of sits on the edges of mental illness and brain science in particular. I think I heard you say it was an op ed where you said that a woman once told you that describing her mental illness is like describing a dog's bark to someone who'd never seen a dog. Tell me about what intrigues you most about trying to bring language to that experience, to mental illness in particular.

[Rachel Aviv]

I have thought about that so much, and I think that woman who said that to me shaped so much of the way I approach sort of psychological experience, because especially with psychiatry, it is so hard to communicate the experience. And so you kind of reach for the available language. And when you reach for that available language, you are also kind of distorting the original experience you had, because it's like conforming or mapping onto symptoms or psychiatric language. Like, it feels like there's a core of distressing experience that we sometimes, like, aren't bothering to articulate because we're relying on the diagnostic language or the kind of, like, advocacy language. I think with sexual abuse, that that was an experience I had where, you know, someone can say I felt violated. And that feels familiar. And of course, it's like, getting to the heart of it. But there was a way in which Andrea, Alice Munro's daughter, spoke in which I felt like I was just appreciating, like, the corrosive nature of not just the abuse, but sort of what it means to sort of not be able to speak about that abuse and that there is value in trying to describe it, in part because other people, it kind of gives language to other people who feel like they're the only ones in the world who've had this experience.

[Tanya Mosley]

You know, books come out and they speak to a particular moment. What do you think your book in this particular moment is sort of telling us or allowing us to see about ourselves? Why meditate particularly on stories of mothers and daughters in this moment and in ways that complicate our notions or what we traditionally read about mother daughter relationships?

[Rachel Aviv]

I mean, motherhood is definitely politicized in ways that become very binary and simplistic. And I have thought a lot about sort of how to write in this particular moment, because everything is happening so fast and nothing rises to the level of corruption that is sort of happening right in front of us. Like, whatever you're uncovering kind of pals. No one's hiding anything anymore, in a way. And I guess I'm just like, it's been a struggle for me and for other journalists I'm friends with to sort of think about what constitutes a story these days. I think, like, complicated stories that hold different viewpoints, that don't take the kind of expected, predictable argument, are something to hold onto and that feel at risk and So I don't want to write stories where I know the answer from the beginning or where I know what the argument is going to be. I like to really feel uncertain until the piece is done.

[Tanya Mosley]

Rachel Levieve, thank you so much for this book and this conversation.

[Rachel Aviv]

Thank you so much.

[Tanya Mosley]

Rachel Levie's new essay collection is called you Won't Get Free of It. Stories of mothers and daughters. Coming up. TV critic John Powers reviews the new comedy series Alice and Steve. This is FRESH air.

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[Embedded Podcast Host]

In 2020, part of my Seattle neighborhood was taken over by a protest occupation.

[NPR Announcer]

We were here to protest police brutality,

[Embedded Podcast Host]

but it ended in tragedy.

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The whole space felt darker and angrier.

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Join me as I investigate the unsolved killing of 16 year old Antonio Mays Jr. Listen to we Keep Us Safe on the embedded podcast from npr.

[Peter Sagal]

Hi, it's me, Peter Sagal, host of Wait, Wait, don't tell me. It's summer. And if you want to turn your pool party into a nerd fest, check out our news quiz. We got comedians, we got celebrities, we got games to help you laugh about the week's news. Yeah, that news. It'll be just like we're all hanging out at your backyard barbecue. Listen every week to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Tanya Mosley]

The offbeat new comedy Alice and Steve tells the story of decades old friends who have a bitter falling out when Steve gets romantically involved with Alice's 20 something daughter. Critic large John Power says the show drove him crazy in a lot of ways, but its best moments kept him watching.

[John Powers]

I grew up watching episodic shows on network tv, nearly all of them formulaic, but some indelibly great. Then, like everyone else, I moved into the days of what my colleague David Biancooley dubbed Platinum tv, where series like the Sopranos and the Wire and Fleabag aspired to something higher. What both these eras had in common was that their shows were carefully crafted. They had an internal logic and a tone that held them together. In recent years, though, there's been a proliferation of shows that, possibly obeying some algorithm, care less for coherence than sensation. They lurch among tones from cuteness to sentimentality to meanness, stirring in random plot twists along the way bouncing all over the emotional map. These shows depend on compelling actors and a few memorable scenes to make us overlook their loose construction. A great example is Alice and Steve, an entertaining but sometimes exasperating 6 part British comedy on Hulu about 250 something best friends who turn on each other after he gets involved with her 26 year old daughter. While the premise is juicy, it's also a tad yucky. And I'm mainly tuned in because its title characters are played by performers Jemaine Clement and from Flight of the Concords and Nicola Walker, whom I've raved up on this show more than once. The series starts poorly with Steve and Alice going on a cutesy bender after a friend's funeral. Now I always hate drunk scenes, which are an invitation to overact. As Clement and Walker bray their lines, we learn that Steve's a divorced celebrity hairstylist who can't find a girlfriend. While Alice is a clothes designer with a doting younger husband. Nicely played by Joel Fry, a sweetie pie of a teenage son. That's Tyrese Eaton, Dice. And of course that 26 year old daughter, Izzy, who's inherited her mother's willfulness. Played by Yale Topol Margalit, Izzy kickstarts the plot by flirting with Steve. Predictably, he succumbs almost immediately. They think they're in love. While the weak willed Steve wants to hide their romance, he knows it's inappropriate. Izzy just blurts out the facts to her mom. Alice flips. And from here on in this series where the women are as alpha as the men are hang dog Alice drives the action betrayed and violently angry. She'll do whatever it takes to break them up. No matter who gets hurt. Her antics unleash Steve's own malice. We're in beef territory here. Early on, Steve and Izzy are walking to a dinner party organized by Alice, who's pretending to have buried the hatchet.

[Rachel Aviv]

You do realize this is probably a

[Tanya Mosley]

trap or she could be trying to work out. Yeah, yeah.

[Rachel Aviv]

No, you're right.

[Tanya Mosley]

This is definitely a trap.

[Peter Sagal]

Yeah.

[Rachel Aviv]

Do you think Daniel's going to punch me?

[NPR Announcer]

Right.

[Rachel Aviv]

As if Daniel would ever punch anyone.

[Tanya Mosley]

Maybe we could show her that this is a good thing. I like her best friend. And how nice that she already really, really loves the guy I'm dating.

[Peter Sagal]

Yeah.

[Tanya Mosley]

You nervous?

[Bombas Advertiser]

Yeah.

[John Powers]

Terrified.

[Rachel Aviv]

Okay.

[John Powers]

At its core, Alice and Steve hinges on the way that platonic friendships are often richer and more powerful than romantic ones. It's a fascinating subject, which may be why I found the script by Sophie Goodheart so frustrating. I wanted her to dig deeper. While the show's got some very funny bits, Alice's sharp tongued mother is a blast. It's often annoyingly lax. If Steve really does the hair of Charlie xcx, how come he's a clueless older guy whose pop culture references are Willie Nelson and Woody Allen? If Izzy truly adores her mother, as she claims, why does she keep rubbing her relationship with Steve in her mom's face? Halfway through, one character nukes the other's career. But this life shattering event has no real weight. It's barely even mentioned for the rest of the series. That said, Alison's Steve is worth seeing for scenes like the one in which Steve spinelessly sells Izzy out, or the lacerating discussion between Alice and her husband when he fully grasps that he adores a woman who views him as a reliable but dull concierge, not a man she likes hanging with. Most touching of all may be the lovely sequence when Alice wise for once smooths a romantic crisis between her son and his would be girlfriend, a pair who are the show's emblem of hope. For once we understand why people love her. While most viewers will find Steve more likable than Alice, the show takes pains not to make him appear predatory or creepy. The role doesn't give Clement a whole lot to do except play variations on shambolic dread and discomfort. The show gets its galvanizing zing from Walker, a beloved star in England with amazing, luminous eyes. Her Alice is the kind of complicated, volcanic heroine that you don't see in movies and rarely see on tv, one who shows her apocalyptic rage freely and in many different forms. At least once in every episode, something would lead me to say, man, is this show a mess. But that wasn't a deal breaker. I kept watching. After all, life is messy, too.

[Tanya Mosley]

John Powers reviewed the series Alice and Steve, now streaming on Hulu. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram NPR FRESH AIR. You can now also watch some of our interviews on YouTube at this Is Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Engineering help today from Adam Stanischewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Annmarie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly CV Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show with Terry Gross. I'm Tonya Moseley.

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Whether you're dedicated to a team, I

[Rachel Aviv]

want to see them win.

[NPR Announcer]

Rooting for a nation. I'm not even a soccer fan, but I'm just repping my people. Or just appreciate the joy the beautiful game inspires.

[John Powers]

No Scotland, no party.

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Find the World cup tab in the NPR app, home to all of NPR's coverage on and off the pitch.

[Rachel Aviv]

Psychologist Candace Odgers studies how tech affects kids, and you might be surprised by

[Tanya Mosley]

what her research reveals.

[Rachel Aviv]

When you compare all the factors that contribute to youth mental health, social media often doesn't make the list. It's one of the least influential factors in predicting mental health. Teens and screens.

[Tanya Mosley]

That's on the TED Radio Hour podcast.

[Rachel Aviv]

Listen on the NPR app, or wherever

[Tanya Mosley]

you get your podcasts.