Namara Smith Books editor

The people closest to us can sometimes be the hardest to see clearly—and mothers might be the blurriest. “The mother-daughter relationship, perhaps more than any other, seems to defy a fixed point of view,” Rachel Aviv writes in “You Won’t Get Free Of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters.” The book, which came out this week, collects six essays originally published in The New Yorker. “I wrote some of these stories feeling, existentially, like a daughter,” Aviv notes in the book’s preface. She describes revising several essays to “redress what I saw as a kind of imbalance, a defect of curiosity about the mother half of the couple.” We talked about that process, how parent-child attachments can resemble a romance, and what books Aviv turned to while writing the pieces in the collection.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

What inspired you to write this book?

A few years ago, I was rereading interview transcripts for my first ever piece for The New Yorker, “God Knows Where I Am,” which I had written when I was twenty-eight. It was about a woman named Linda Bishop who’d had a psychotic break and ended up living in an abandoned farmhouse subsisting on apples. Revisiting the transcripts in my mid-thirties, I was taken aback when I found that Linda’s best friend had told me that Linda had been pregnant before college, and had given up the baby.

I was amazed that I had not even mentioned this biographical fact in the finished piece. I had essentially described Linda’s psychosis as emerging out of nowhere, after a happy childhood. I called Linda’s sister and asked her about the baby. The question seemed to open up a layer of experience that I had missed.

Did having children yourself change your approach?

There’s becoming a parent, and there’s also the fact of getting older—you no longer identify with the younger person in the room, and you become more aware of the instability of your perspective, as a person and as a journalist.

The Linda Bishop story, it turns out, wasn’t the only time I’d omitted a lost baby. There are two other stories in the book in which parents lose their babies, but when I originally published those pieces I breezed past those events, as if they didn’t merit mention. I somehow hadn’t been curious enough, and in returning to these pieces I tried to slow down and capture that sense of rupture and loss.

In the preface to your collection, you say that your mother was the first subject of your writing. What was it like to write about her again in this book?

I hadn’t been planning to, but while I was thinking about these ideas my mom happened to be moving, and she ended up finding a pile of her own journals from the late seventies and early eighties. When I asked her if I could read them, she immediately said, “Sure!” I felt like I was encountering her with the same sense of freshness and appreciation that I often feel when I am reading the writing of a stranger. I didn’t have to bristle at her idealism, as I might now.

Were there any books you returned to during the writing process, which you would recommend?

One of my favorite books is “Parallel Lives,” by Phyllis Rose. I’ve always loved the idea of joint profiles of two people who are in love and in conflict over the course of their lives. And it occurred to me that, instead of focussing on horizontal couples, I could focus on vertical ones. At times, the mother-daughter relationship feels like a romance or a marriage. And then, suddenly, it doesn’t. There often is a kind of tragic “breakup.” And, hopefully, later, a coming together again.

Other mother-child portraits I really admire are Gwendoline Riley’s “My Phantoms” and Susie Boyt’s “Loved and Missed,” two novels about mothers who feel out of reach to their daughters. I also really liked Helen Garner’s essay about her mother, “Dreams of Her Real Self,” from the book “Everywhere I Look.” And Natalia Ginzburg’s “Human Relationships in a Changing World” is an incredible depiction of the instability of our concerns and self-conception at each stage of life.

The work of Yiyun Li also felt influential. There’s a way of writing about parenthood that can be sentimental and reductive, but she makes it unfamiliar again. One of her sentences in “Where Reasons End” captures what a lot of the stories I’d written about seemed to express: “The essence of growing up is to play hide and seek with one’s mother successfully.”

Whistler

By Ann Patchett

When Daphne, the middle-aged narrator of this pensive novel, was a child, she developed a precious bond with Eddie, her stepfather. But, after the pair got into a car accident, Daphne’s mother divorced Eddie, alleging that he was negligent, and then cut him off entirely. Daphne “put the whole thing”—her memories of Eddie, and of that night—“in a box.” For nearly half a century, she left those thoughts untouched. Then Daphne and Eddie run into each other, and, despite all the time that has passed, Daphne finds that the two are still profoundly connected. Together, she and Eddie face their respective pasts, untangling the feelings of betrayal, regret, and love that emerge in the process.

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Land

By Maggie O’Farrell

Cartography serves as both narrative engine and theme in “Land,” a new historical novel by the author of “Hamnet.” A central figure, Tomás, is a skilled laborer in eighteen-sixties Ireland, tasked with making maps for the British, who are occupying the country. He wants to depict not only relevant topographical features and place names but also the ravages of the Great Hunger, which killed twelve per cent of the population and led two million more to emigrate. Through its characters, the book stages an argument about the virtues of various types of maps—those measured, those recollected, those dreamed up.

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John of John

By Douglas Stuart

Set on a remote island off the coast of Scotland, this rich, intricate novel follows a young gay art-school graduate, Cal, who returns home when his devout father, John, a tenant farmer who raised him alone, intimates that his grandmother is ill. In Falabay, the largely Presbyterian village of his upbringing, Cal hides his sexuality; he remembers people looking at him, as a teen-ager, with “faint unease.” Stuart’s novel examines the threads that bind Cal and John together—blood, faith, tradition, grievance, violence, and more commonalities than they know. At the same time, it is a coming-of-age story, in which Cal must define the relationship between himself and his origins. “Do you even want all this?” his mother asks him, at one point. “To be home. To be here.”

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Coming Soon:

• Sigrid Nunez’s first collection of short stories, “It Will Come Back to You,” will be published July 14th.
• Julie Buntin’s “Famous Men” is the story of a high schooler from Michigan who, believing she has found the father she has never known, travels to New York City to meet him. It’s also out on July 14th.

Our critic Jessica Winter is loving:

• “Learning,” by Courtney Bush. Winter says, “If Virginia Woolf had worked in child care, she might have written something like this novella, a day in the life of a New York City preschool teacher which—as Auden once wrote of Woolf—combines a ‘mystical vision with the sharpest possible sense for the concrete, even in its humblest form.’ ”