YOU WON'T GET FREE OF IT

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.