Writer Rachel Aviv explores the complexity of the mother-daughter bond

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Tonya Mosley· Host0:23

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tonya Mosley. In 1980, a young woman sat down at her typewriter while her baby slept and tried to become a writer. She wanted to write something that mattered, a Madame Bovary. Instead, most days she folded laundry or fell asleep. That woman was my guest's mother, writer Rachel Aviv, who would grow up to become a writer herself for The New Yorker. Aviv's new book is a collection of stories about mothers and daughters. She first wrote them for The New Yorker, a young teacher who experienced a mysterious condition that caused her to forget who she was, disappearing for days at a time. A Filipino woman who left her nine children to raise someone else's in the US. When she wrote them the first time, Aviv identified with the daughters without quite realizing it. Then she became a mother herself, went back, and saw how much of the mother she'd missed. The book is called You Won't Get Free Of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters. Rachel Aviv is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes about medicine, mental illness,