The Beginning of the Story

THE ESSAYS IN Rachel Aviv’s fantastic new book, You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, are expanded and revised from pieces originally published in The New Yorker, where she’s a staff writer. They span a decade of reporting, including Aviv’s piece on Linda Bishop, a New Hampshire woman who went off her meds and spent her final days in an abandoned house (Aviv’s first piece for the magazine, published in 2011), and what could be considered the book’s centerpiece, a riveting narrative of the decades-long silence around the sexual abuse of Alice Munro’s daughter (2024).