Rachel Aviv: ‘There’s a way of writing about motherhood that can be very sentimental and boring’

As one of today’s greatest essayists, the Pulitzer-nominated writer’s new book investigates why the mother-daughter relationship is the most complex bond of all

Interviewing Rachel Aviv is a great way to source reading recommendations. The exacting essayist responds to my questions about her new book by asking if I’ve read her colleague Parul Sehgal on the trauma plot (of course), Janet Malcolm’s oeuvre (are you kidding?), or Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose (you know, I’ve been meaning to). And then there’s the self-help book from the 90s making the rounds among her friends.

The Middle Passage – “a bad title”, admits Aviv – advances the Jungian belief that if you hold on to the identity you first developed in young adulthood, in middle age you’ll end up small and afraid. You have to alter something fundamental in order to make it to the other side. Over green tea at a cafe near her home in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, the New Yorker staff writer on the deliciously nebulous “psychology, medical ethics and criminal justice” beat confirms that’s basically, frustratingly true. “I have always been very afraid of change,” she says. “I had a really profound high school relationship where I totally lost myself. Everything I’d been interested in before just fell away.” She feared this would happen when she gave birth to her first child in 2017, and was thrilled when it didn’t: “I thought I had won, as if there weren’t more opportunities for change later down the road.”