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

And it's kind of about how you cannot possibly make a decision to have a child that is rational because...

the conditions of your life and your understanding of values will change so radically that, like, it sort of explodes the idea of a reasoned decision.

And she compares it to the decision to become a vampire.

I think I found that, like, incredibly frightening.

Maybe because, like, I had spent so much time as a

Feeling like I needed to establish this identity and then kind of cling to it nervously.

Yeah, I guess I look back on that and it's not that I feel I'm so changed.

I probably wish I were changed more, but I do think...

I do think that sort of holding on to sameness feels like the behavior of someone who is frightened.

And I would love to know what Martha Nussbaum and Elizabeth Loftus think now about what they were doing during birth.

Like, at the time, I kind of glorified it or romanticized it.

And I would like, they're both, you know, in their 70s or 80s, I would like to know if they think they were too brittle and that they were too afraid of change and that they didn't realize how long life actually was.

I remember the children that I was with, it was sort of this old school, like anorexia ward, where I was surrounded by older, slightly older girls, like 12 felt old to me because I was six.

And I remember learning from them and understanding what anorexia was, not because I was sort of

bringing the palette of symptoms to the table, but because they were telling me things like, you know, you're supposed to exercise, that's how you burn calories, or like do jumping jacks, look at your stomach, these things.

And it was such a strange kind of competitive environment in which girls who all had some form of related distress were put together and then began to

express that distress in increasingly similar ways.

I think I felt very proud of myself.

I had done this severe act of self-discipline and...

that there was something like noble and it was proof of my sort of strong individuality.

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