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You Won’t Get Free of It

Stories of Mothers and Daughters

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You Won’t Get Free of It

By: Rachel Aviv
Narrated by: Andi Arndt
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Real-life stories of mothers and daughters – of what we inherit, what we bury and what we, finally, find the courage to say – by the award-winning New Yorker staff writer.

You Won’t Get Free of It tells the stories of mothers and daughters searching for each other and for themselves. Aviv explores the complexity of this relationship in seven essays, six originally published in the New Yorker and reconceived for this intimate, revelatory book.

Aviv writes about one mother searching for her vanished daughter; another who sacrifices herself for her daughters by working as a nanny for other people’s children. In the final story, a daughter’s traumatic experience is erased by her family, only to be recast by her mother, the writer Alice Munro, in stories celebrated around the world.

You Won’t Get Free of It is an astonishing exploration of the competing dynamics of knowing and unknowing, recognition and refusal, that shape our most foundational relationship.

'Beautiful, thoughtful and probing writer' Daisy Johnson

© Rachel Aviv 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

Essays Motherhood Parenting & Families Parents & Adult Children Women
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Critic reviews

These essays struck deep notes when I read them in the New Yorker; she is simply brilliant (Anne Enright)
Aviv is an instinctive storyteller
I admire her rigor and eloquence but also her restraint - she makes vivid experiences we can't explain (Ben Lerner)
Janet Malcolm's successor at the New Yorker
Being a mother doesn’t make you better or more sage… But in Aviv’s care, at least, it seems to have brought new depths to her already excellent journalism
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