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

Before Bernie Sanders or AOC, a man named Michael Harrington tried to market socialism to the American public. Tens of millions of Americans were poor, miserable, in body and in spirit. On NPR's Through Line, how the founder of the DSA created a modern political movement. Listen to Throughline in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air, I'm Tanya 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 Avive, 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 U.S. When she wrote them the first time, Avive 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 Laviv is a staff writer at The New Yorker where she writes about medicine, mental illness, and criminal justice.

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