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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I'm not sure that there's another writer where you can read the short story so many new times and each time feel like your understanding has shifted. To me, there's something beyond the sort of incredibly astute descriptions of people's inner lives. There's something formally that she's sort of turned the short story into and sort of stretched the limits of it.
I mean, it's interesting looking at the Nobel Prize presentation. The secretary is pretty on point. He says she writes about the silent and the silenced, the people who don't make choices, the people who only understand sort of aspects of their life years later when it's been revealed. many of her early books are about this kind of
poor, rural upbringing where children are pretty cruel to each other and parents are neglectful and there are a lot of horrific sort of freak events that happen quickly. She kind of writes about each phase of her life as she passes through it, not necessarily about herself, but about people going through sort of crises of middle age and then the crises of late age. And I think her stories...
are unique in the way that they kind of skip forward, like suddenly you're 15 years forward in time. And someone is sort of only grasping what happened in their past belatedly. The thing that feels sort of most present for me in terms of her writing is the sense that, like, she'd be moving through the world and someone would say something and then those words would feel, like, alive to her.
And she would sort of write a story around those words and that this constantly happened to her where sort of... It almost felt like she was moving through the world in a different way, like things had a kind of secret intensity that she could pick up on and that she wanted to capture somehow.
Mm-hmm, last spring.
Yeah, there was a really interesting letter that she wrote to her agent. And she's saying, like, I cannot go on another book tour in order to sort of be a social self. I have to take so many uppers that I can't sleep for 72 hours. And then in order to sleep, I need to take so many downers that I'm sort of endangering my life. And I'm in this sort of dysregulated state. And she was saying...
I don't know if I can publish another book if it requires a book tour because it sort of does damage to myself.
Yeah. And she essentially said... My stepfather sexually abused me when I was nine, and my mother protected him for our entire lives.
Jerry Fremlin. And then Jenny, who is Andrea's older sister, and Andrew, who is her stepbrother, both wrote essays as well, sort of talking about the way that the silence had shaped their lives and their family's.
Well, it's funny because the morning that the Toronto Star article came out, my friend who's from Toronto just emailed it to me and was like, Rachel, you should write about this. And then over the next few days, a few other people, friends were like, you're writing about this, right? What did that tell you?
I think because it's about so many things that I, you know, memory, sort of family, trauma, the sort of generational dynamics of,
So Alice was away. Her father was dying. And... Andrea asked if she could sleep in the master bedroom, and Jerry Fremlin said, okay, don't tell your mother. And from there, he got into her bed and sexually abused her. She said it didn't even occur to her to tell her mother because she felt so unsafe in that house. And then it continued until she was...
through puberty, this sort of him exposing himself to her and sort of trying to proposition her.
I mean, so after Andrea told her mother about the abuse in 1992, which is 16 years after it happened, Alice left Jerry Fremlin. And he then sort of unleashed this, like, torrent of letters in which he was...
ostensibly defending himself, except what the letters actually were were like incredibly detailed confessions in which he explained that he was sort of responding to this nine-year-old seductress and that he knows that there are lolitos in the world and he was simply being a humpert, a humpert.
Well, she did immediately leave her partner and go to their second home on the west coast of Canada. And Andrea came there to be with her and felt the experience was not about her. It was about her mother as this sort of betrayed lover. Alice Monroe took her Jerry Fremlin back within a month. Within a month. Within a month.
And, you know, the way she explained it to Andrea was, you know, I loved him too much. I'm too dependent. I'm too old.
She was a participant in like a pretty psychologically abusive relationship and had many of the dynamics of sort of women who try to leave men and don't feel like they can exist without that man. There was a sort of confused idea about...
Like this sort of idea that she often would tell Andrea that it was misogynistic to expect a mother to sacrifice her own happiness because her husband has done a bad thing. And Andrea really internalized that and would tell her mother that. And like, yes, of course, like no one would ever ask a father to do this, only a mother. Therefore, I cannot ask my mother to do this.
Showing 341–360 of 401 · page 18 of 21
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