Rachel Aviv's New Book "You Won't Get Free of It"

I see in the Times that Rachel Aviv has a new book out – You Won’t Get Free of It. It’s a collection of Aviv’s New Yorker writings, including her unforgettable piece on the revelations by Alice Munro’s youngest daughter that she'd been sexually abused by her stepfather as a child, and that Munro stayed with the abuser even after he was convicted of the assault. That piece, from which the book takes its title, is one of the most rigorous dissections of family trauma that I’ve ever read. The Times’ reviewer, Melanie Thernstrom, asks, “Can a profile of the writer Alice Munro and her troubled family life be as rich, as complicated, as real as Munro’s own stories are?” She answers,

The stunning title essay in Rachel Aviv’s new collection, “You Won’t Get Free of It,” shows it can. Munro’s stories often feature family secrets that are hiding in plain sight, glimpsed and forgotten, divulged and disavowed. Aviv reveals the shocking autobiographical root of this motif: Munro’s second husband, Gerry, abused her youngest daughter, Andrea, starting when she was 9. (He steadfastly maintained that his stepdaughter was a “Lolita” who had a crush on him.) When Andrea finally told Munro as a young adult, her mother stayed with Gerry, sacrificing her relationship with her daughter.

Yes, the piece is stunning. I was stunned by it when I read it in The New Yorker (see my post here). It’s a meticulous, sensitive, brilliant analysis – well worth preserving between hard covers.