The Guardian interviews acclaimed New Yorker essayist Rachel Aviv about her second collection, You Won't Get Free of It, which reframes several of her reported stories around the mother-daughter relationship. The piece matters as a profile of one of today's most celebrated magazine writers, whose work — spanning psychology, medical ethics and criminal justice — has earned a National Magazine award, a George Polk award and a 2025 Pulitzer finalist nod.

Aviv explains she wanted to avoid the sentimental, reductive clichés of writing about motherhood, instead lifting a relatable dynamic out of its usual contexts so readers become temporary analysts of their own family lives. The book draws its title from an Alice Munro short story — Aviv's investigation into abuse connected to Munro partly prompted the collection — and opens with a personal preface about her own writer mother, alongside reflections on her earlier work and her childhood anorexia diagnosis.