Rachel Aviv has a profound interest in the vagaries of human psychology: Strangers to Ourselves, her last book, profiled five people whose psychiatric states resisted straightforward explanation, testing the limits of the mental health system. A Pulitzer finalist, Aviv has become known for rigorous, penetrating journalism that is as empathic as it is insightful. Now comes You Won’t Get Free of It, six stories of mothers and daughters, all originally published in the New Yorker.
Madness runs through this book, too, in the stories of Linda Bishop, a woman who, upon discharge from hospital after a psychotic break, holed up in an abandoned farmhouse and tried to subsist on apples alone, and of Mary, a woman whose delusions and paranoia were only seemingly cured as a side-effect of chemotherapy. It’s also there in the childhood memories of the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus – a professional court witness for those who have been accused of abuse, one of whom was Harvey Weinstein. Loftus’s mother was found drowned, perhaps as a result of suicide. In Aviv’s masterly profile, she teases out a conclusion that leaves you pondering the extent to which this memory expert can rely on her own recollections, and what that says about her particular line of work.
