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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's about a young girl named Liza and her younger brother. And in the summers, they go every day to play with this man and his wife, who has sort of become a mother figure. And the man is sexually abusing the children. It sort of emerges. The story is sort of structured as an investigation into whether the mother knows and chooses to look away, or doesn't know but should know.
And in that story, there are lines Or images that are almost lifted from the letter that Andrea wrote to her mother disclosing her abuse and from a letter that Jerry wrote about their relationship. So it feels, you can sort of see pieces of sort of language, sentences that must have like lit her up in some way or like made her feel like she had to build a story around it.
She did for a while. It must have been horrific. You know, she said that for a while she almost tried to convince herself to be hopeful, and she felt like, okay, here she is. She's getting it out. She's working through it. You know, there was one story, Rich as Stink, that has this image of a daughter wearing a wedding dress that burns.
And it's this, like, and Andrea said, you know, here's this image of innocence destroyed. Like, there's this feeling that her mother must understand. And then eventually Andrea realized that, like, the insights were going to her characters and not to her daughters and not to herself.
And then Andrea felt increasingly enraged by sort of the passivity of the characters, the sense of them sort of existing in this, like, bleak survival mode.
You know, I think this sort of is a defining problem in her life in a way, that she appears to be thriving.
Right. And that, you know, in a way, as a child, it was a coping mechanism. There's a sense that, like, she held the key to either destroying her family or keeping their family together. And so they all felt like she was kind of the star of the family, the one who was the most like her mother. Right.
She and I had conversations about that where I would say, like, I'm worried I'm slipping into that state that the siblings are in where you seem to be thriving. Your daughter just said you have this incredible joy for life. You do seem to have this incredible joy. I mean, something she said to me that I found really profound was...
One of the letters from the 70s that Alice wrote was about being raped by a colleague. First, she says she was so numb that she just walked aimlessly around the city and missed the class she was supposed to teach that day. And then later on, she says, well, we'll make a good story.
Yeah. But Andrea said, you know, when I read that letter, at first I kind of felt pain for my mother because I know that feeling of, you know, aimlessly walking around the city. And then she said the next feeling I had was rage that like she did a day of that and sort of moved on to have this incredibly productive life. And I still feel like I'm walking aimlessly around the city. Yeah.
I think what was hardest for her was watching Jenny receive the prize from the king of Sweden because Alice was too weak at that point to go to Sweden. And she felt like, oh, you know, the family really is happier that I'm not in it. Now they can live this one reality together.
A question that feels almost more alive to me is the way that her writing makes you think about art at what expense. Not to sort of deny that it's art and that it has value as art, but to think about what existed in its wake, sort of who was harmed, what was sacrificed. And that's probably a question that is relevant for many artists, but Alice Munro kind of makes it visible on the page.
Like, it felt so literal, like, you know, trading your daughter for art.
Not as if it were necessarily a conscious decision, but I think Alice did speak with a lot of self-awareness about how she abandoned her mother as she was dying because she felt like she couldn't be the person she wanted to be if she was a good daughter. And that person was a writer.
Her own mother who was dying, who had Parkinson's.
But the repetition, I think that she could speak very honestly and with a lot of self-awareness about how she had to abandon her own mother to become a writer, that I'm sort of feeling that there was a certain awareness probably about how she also abandoned her daughter to be the writer she became.
I mean, I feel horrified. I feel horrified that it's hard because like, you know, what would she say? Did she think the work is more important? Is that just sort of what the decision she made?
I think maybe because in that, you know, one of the most like chilling moments for me was when the biographer, Bob Thacker, when I read the conversation between Alice and him about, she was sort of asking him like, what do my daughters want you to do?
And he was telling her, and she stated really clearly, you know, my daughters want me to admit that I am with a pedophile, but if I did, it would be the only thing people know about me, and I worked a long time to become who I am. And she sort of, I mean, couldn't be more stark than that.
Thank you. Thank you.
Showing 321–340 of 401 · page 17 of 21
← Previous
Next →