You Won't Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters

A collection of reported stories that explore the relationship between mothers and daughters, from the finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for her work in The New Yorker.

You Won't Get Free of It tells the stories of mothers and daughters searching for each other and for themselves. Rachel Aviv explores the complexity of this relationship in seven essays, six originally published in The New Yorker and reconceived for this intimate, revelatory book. "I wrote some of these stories feeling, existentially, like a daughter, and now I have returned to them with a different identification," Aviv writes. "It was as if I had failed to see the drama on the mother's side, too--her particular longings and humiliations and needs."

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. Illuminating ineffable registers of experience, Aviv reckons with the way that disowned knowledge forms and deforms families and lives.

Author: Rachel Aviv
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Published: 07/07/2026
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.79lbs
Size: 8.41h x 5.61w x 1.21d
ISBN: 9780525657057


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 05/15/2026
Publishers Weekly 05/04/2026
Booklist 06/01/2026

About the Author
RACHEL AVIV is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes about psychology, medical ethics, and criminal justice, among other subjects. She is a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and the winner of a George Polk Award and a National Magazine Award. Her 2022 book, Strangers to Ourselves, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times bestseller. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.