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YOU WON'T GET FREE OF IT

Name: YOU WON'T GET FREE OF IT
Author: Rachel Aviv
ISBN: 9780525657057

STORIES OF MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS

by Rachel Aviv ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 7, 2026

Both intellectually and empathetically astute, probing the uneasy complexity of a defining relationship dynamic.

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A series of essays evaluates the labyrinthian nature of mother-daughter relationships.

Recognized for her journalism illuminating the human complexity of mental illness, Aviv returns in this volume to six stories she previously published in The New Yorker, revising them with a focus on the mother-daughter connection. These are not sentimental tales of easy, enduring love, and loyalty. Instead, she digs into the murk and mess of shared and inherited trauma, fitful and discontinuous bonds, and the “overwhelming and exhausting fusion” that complicates this oft-examined, frequently overwrought relationship dynamic. For the women at the center of each essay, the ability to “mother” rides along the knife edge of psychiatric medications, personal histories of loss, and global economic dynamics of exported caretaking labor. Their motherhood easily falls prey to the oppression of ubiquitous social structures, from marriage to shifting definitions of feminism and ambition. Much of Aviv’s familiar expertise circles her contexts: declining standards of care for the mentally ill, the precarity of psychological diagnosis and treatment, and the burden of seeking care for loved ones who are mentally ill, especially when it is a daughter negotiating that process. At times, Aviv’s subjects make the reader squirm, as when she profiles Elizabeth Loftus, who served as an expert witness for Harvey Weinstein’s defense, or venerated author’s Alice Munro’s covering up the molestation of her younger daughter by her second husband. But even for more digestible characters, there are fugue states, schizophrenia, psychotic delusions, and seemingly superhuman denial that overshadow and obliterate the potential for tidy narratives. Such defiant discomfort is central to the author’s point: There is no easy heroine or clean arc across the mother-daughter continuum. Rather, this is a link that tests the definitions and limits of need, memory, guilt, and healing, redrawing the terms of both connection and individuation.

Both intellectually and empathetically astute, probing the uneasy complexity of a defining relationship dynamic.

Pub Date: July 7, 2026

ISBN: 9780525657057

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026

Categories:

FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS

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THINK YOU'LL BE HAPPY

MOVING THROUGH GRIEF WITH GRIT, GRACE, AND GRATITUDE

by Nicole Avant ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 17, 2023

Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.

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Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.

“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”

Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.

Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023

ISBN: 9780063304413

Page Count: 288

Publisher: HarperOne

Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023

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THE MINOTAUR AT CALLE LANZA

by Zito Madu ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2024

An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.

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An author’s trip to Venice takes a distinctly Borgesian turn.

In November 2020, soccer club Venizia F.C. offered Nigerian American author Madu a writing residency as part of its plan “to turn the team into a global entity of fashion, culture, and sports.” Flying to Venice for the fellowship, he felt guilty about leaving his immigrant parents, who were shocked to learn upon moving to the U.S. years earlier that their Nigerian teaching certifications were invalid, forcing his father to work as a stocking clerk at Rite Aid to support the family. Madu’s experiences in Venice are incidental to what is primarily a story about his family, especially his strained relationship with his father, who was disappointed with many of his son’s choices. Unfortunately, the author’s seeming disinterest in Venice renders much of the narrative colorless. He says the trip across the Ponte della Libertà bridge was “magical,” but nothing he describes—the “endless water on both sides,” the nearby seagulls—is particularly remarkable. Little in the text conveys a sense of place or the unique character of his surroundings. Madu is at his best when he focuses on family dynamics and his observations that, in the largely deserted city, “I was one of the few Black people around.” He cites Borges, giving special note to the author’s “The House of Asterion,” in which the minotaur “explains his situation as a creature and as a creature within the labyrinth” of multiple mirrors. This notion leads to the Borgesian turn in the book’s second half, when, in an extended sequence, Madu imagines himself transformed into a minotaur, with “the head of a bull” and his body “larger, thicker, powerful but also cumbersome.” It’s an engaging passage, although stylistically out of keeping with much of what has come before.

An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.