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
And then I think there was like this sense for Alice that the writing was the most important thing and that she was sort of.
on a kind of existential level, like living in this, in a way that's hard to describe, where she was sort of watching and not totally present and maybe not able to really feel her daughter's experience, whether it was dissociation or some sort of artistic distance that had become her mode of living.
That line really resonates because there's this story she wrote years before where a girl is sort of being abused sexually, like sort of being groped on a train. Which one is this? This is Wild Swans. And she says, you know, she just wanted to see what will happen. It's almost the same language, the sense of like... I'm just going to kind of keep going here because I'm so curious.
And she describes herself as victim and accomplice, and there's this sense of feeling like an accomplice because of that curiosity, of that wanting it to happen, or wanting to not interfere with the action that will come to her.
Probably. I mean, I feel like it was more helpless than that because, of course, she had deep wounds from her own life. Right.
In sort of complex dynamics, it was a power game, sort of. She would be beaten, and then her mother would sort of come to her like a supplicant with all these treats and she would sort of resist and then she would fall back into it.
And I think, you know, like there's this language of like art monsters, which like sure applies, but I also feel like it's maybe less interesting or true to the experience of, you know, just being very wounded and sort of finding a man who kind of speaks to those wounds.
No, no, not to heal them. To allow her to sort of unknowingly replicate patterns from her childhood.
Yeah. I mean... It's just like an incredible level of sort of living, of performing. And I think, you know, she's spoken about that a lot in interviews, of feeling like she is two women. You know, one is the woman who's sort of being what other people want her to be. And the other is the woman who's sort of living a solitary, kind of watchful, removed existence. And so...
Well, the interview with Daphne Merkin was the tipping point for Andrea, where she felt like... What year is it? I think it was 2004. And she felt like she was just being erased. And that was what prompted her to go to the police and report the abuse.
I talked to the detective and he was, you know, praising her for being this, like, incredibly straightforward witness who looks him in the eye. And, you know, and she had these incredible letters to back it up. Like, she was handing him the perpetrator's confession.
It was sort of patched up really quickly. He pled guilty to indecent assault. There was no jury.
Yeah. And then there was a letter that he wrote to his lawyer basically saying the trial strategy is to exclude the press. And at the time of the court case, Alice had planned to leave him and to move in with her friend who had an empty house for her. And then abruptly she canceled the plan.
Yeah, I was surprised talking to the Toronto Star reporter who ultimately broke the story. But she said when she was first proposed the story after Andrea had sent an email, she said no. She didn't want to do it. She didn't want to take down an idol. She didn't want to jeopardize her relationships and publishing. She'd seen Alice Munro as this emblem of feminism and
And she'd sort of been inspired by the idea that you could tell your own story and take control over your own story. And ultimately, she did change her mind. But even that thought that in 2024, there was like a day-long pause before she was ready to do it. And even before then, Andrea had reached out to a number of journalists, and she got no response.
There was this sense of, like, we all need to protect our mother. And this feeling that she was very horribly fragile and that, like, this refrain in the family, like, she'll die if she knows.
And the sisters kind of took their cue from the parents. Jenny tried to tell her mother. And actually, Sheila almost told her mother. But they both, there was this kind of mythology of like, we must not impinge on this great, great career and on this fragile woman.
I mean, he just basically said, it's not the book I'm writing. I think what he said to me at one point was, every family has a thing like this.
I try not to respond with judgment. I think I just listened. But we're sitting here. It's just us two. I mean, why write a biography if you're not going to sort of – Yeah, I think, you know, Andrea said in a letter to him, like, he had responded, you know, I'll make sure I didn't, like, say anything too flattering, essentially, about Jerry.
And she said, I didn't mean cross out flattering adjectives. I meant, you know, scrap the whole book.
Showing 361–380 of 401 · page 19 of 21
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