Rachel Aviv, a Pulitzer finalist known for empathetic, incisive journalism, follows her acclaimed Strangers to Ourselves with You Won't Get Free of It, a collection of six essays on mothers and daughters originally published in the New Yorker. The book explores the most complex of family relationships through cases of psychological instability, disappearance and neglect, and stands out for Aviv's willingness to interrogate her own past blind spots as a journalist and, more recently, as a mother herself.

The essays include the stories of Linda Bishop, who died after subsisting on apples in an abandoned farmhouse; Hannah Upp, who vanished during a fugue state; and psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, whose own mother drowned. The standout piece examines novelist Alice Munro's failure to protect her daughter Andrea from abuse by her partner, a betrayal only fully exposed through the persistence of journalists including Aviv. Throughout, Aviv reflects candidly on her own earlier "deficit of curiosity" about mothers, admitting she once overlooked their perspectives before revisiting and correcting that imbalance in this collection.