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

Right.

So what she was doing felt new and felt brave.

And in a way, it was almost as if in the spirit of feminism or whatever, she felt she was justified in freeing herself from the burden of her daughter's abuse.

And I was just struck, you know, that...

She felt she would not get free of that abandonment of a child, or she articulated that in a story.

And that has become her legacy, that she is not free of the way that she abandoned her daughter.

It was interesting.

I've written about artists or writers who have done things that really complicate their life.

legacy or their work and I did find myself feeling more respect for Alice Munro's sort of craft and writing and the stories were not fading for me they were incredible like works of art for me um

It was like, it felt like the moral universe is such that you would think that there should be some sort of shift in her career, in her writing, and she'd be like punished aesthetically for that.

turning her daughter's abuse into art but the but the strange thing was the work got better like it was it was more complex it was more fraught intense and and sort of written from multiple perspectives it wasn't better morally but aesthetically maybe it was how do you sit with that

I guess you don't read writing because the person is good.

I don't know.

I think I was less interested when I was writing the piece about sort of what to do with her legacy, like what to do with sort of the bad artist or the monster artist, and just more interested in how the monstrous axe sort of was converted into this new form that she almost created.

I think the initial news of Alice Munro's silencing of the abuse was the moment when a lot of people who had seen her as this feminist icon felt a real sense of tragedy and almost heartbreak.

And I was upset to find that as I reported the story,

What Alice Munro had done seemed in a way worse than I had expected.

Like, it wasn't that I was finding justifications and sort of reasons.

It was actually even more cold than I had expected.

Yeah, it felt quite cold.

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