Rachel Aviv

speaker

401 appearances 3 recordings 3 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard 6 Jul

Rachel Aviv’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · Writer Rachel Aviv explores the complexity of the mother-daughter bond · 6 Jul 2026 podcast

Yeah.

The novelist Yi-Yan Lee writes that the essence of growing up is to play hide-and-seek with one's mother successfully.

In this book, I have chosen stories originally published in The New Yorker of mother-child pairs acting out this game.

Yeah.

Thank you so much.

I was rereading the first piece I had written for The New Yorker when I was 28.

And I was rereading it because for my last book, I was writing about sort of issues related to psychiatric insight.

And the first story I wrote for The New Yorker really dealt with those issues.

So I just wanted to reread my notes and sort of see what kind of information I had been collecting at that time.

And as I was reading my interview notes, I noticed that

The story is about a woman named Linda Bishop who refuses psychiatric care in a psychiatric hospital in New Hampshire, leaves the hospital, and ends up sort of subsisting on apples in an abandoned farmhouse.

And in the story, I remember I had described her...

And her mental illness is sort of emerging out of nowhere after a happy, harmonious childhood.

And when I was rereading my notes, I was struck that a friend of Linda's had told me that she had given up a baby for adoption when she was in her late teens.

And I was amazed that I just had not mentioned that in the piece, that that detail had not registered as an important life event.

So that was the first moment that I became just aware of kind of the instability of my own authority in a way or sort of how much my life experience was shaping the kind of questions I was asking and the curiosities I had.

Hannah was a teacher in Harlem in 2008.

A very loved person.

She had many, many friends.

And one day she disappeared, essentially.

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