You Wont Get Free of It, Rachel Aviv
You Wont Get Free of It, Rachel Aviv
List: $20.99 | Sale: $14.70
Club: $10.49

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

Author: Rachel Aviv

Narrator: Andi Arndt

Unabridged: 7 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/07/2026

Synopsis

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • 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.

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.

Reviews

There are currently no user reviews for this audiobook.

Quotes

“A piercing look at the fraught bond between mothers and daughters. . . . Each chapter demonstrates Aviv’s exhaustive reporting and impressive intimacy with her sources. . . . Together the pieces in this piercing collection shed light on how the bond between mothers and daughters can alchemize, through trauma, into something inescapable.” —The New York Times

“Aviv’s journalistic method leans on the idea of unreliable narration. . . . As the collection makes clear, Aviv prefers restless questioning to closure or complacency.” —Los Angeles Times

“Aviv’s openness to new perspectives (and her transparency about the process) makes her work richer and wiser than it already was. . . . Being a mother doesn’t make you better or more sage. But in Aviv’s case, it seems to have brought new depths to her already excellent journalism.” —The Times (London)

“A hallmark of Aviv’s work is both her ability to penetrate to the sources of her subjects’ distress, and to gain their trust. . . . One of the interesting things about Aviv’s work is its willingness to deal with the possibility that the mystery will not be resolved tidily, or at all.” —4Columns

“Recognized for her journalism illuminating the human complexity of mental illness, Aviv returns in You Won’t Get Free of It to six stories she previously published in The New Yorker, revising them with a focus on the mother-daughter connection. . . . Both intellectually and empathetically astute, probing the uneasy complexity of a defining relationship dynamic.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“In this thought-provoking collection of essays, Rachel Aviv explores the complex relationships between mothers and daughters. . . . A compelling, well-written collection.” —Booklist

Add to Cart
Add to Wish List