Stunning ... A collection of compelling essays exploring tangled mother-daughter relationships. As with the proverbial Chinese finger puzzle, the more her subjects pull away, the tighter the trap becomes ... Each chapter demonstrates Aviv’s exhaustive reporting and impressive intimacy with her sources ... Only one, albeit moving, piece on undocumented Filipino domestic workers feels like it doesn’t quite belong ... Together the pieces in this piercing collection shed light on how the bond between mothers and daughters can alchemize, through trauma, into something inescapable.
Aviv’s writing has a quality that makes everything she describes feel like both a mystery and an inevitability. Her stories develop in ways that her subjects (and her readers) could not have predicted; at the same time, what unfolds is revealed to be the only way things could have happened ... Here in Free, Aviv brings in her skill and precision to open up the original New Yorker essays with revisions to include more from the mother’s perspective, after Aviv realized that she had, unconsciously or otherwise, omitted something that had seemed too obvious to be considered relevant ... Impeccable deconstructions and brilliant renderings of what she has found and seen and learned.
Aviv’s journalistic method leans on the idea of unreliable narration ... All the shifts in time and point of view — and the lingering over details, both telling and not — have a downside. These reported essays can feel self-indulgent, slow and overlong ... Individually, these stories aren’t fully satisfying, but perhaps they aren’t meant to be. As the collection makes clear, Aviv prefers restless questioning to closure or complacency.
Aviv’s writing also defies a fixed point of view. She moves effortlessly between reporting on events in one moment and entering the inner lives of her subjects the next, as though you were reading a short story told in the third person ... No one who reads Aviv’s book will ever read Alice Munro in the same way again, but they may read her, as I did, with a strange new curiosity.
When writers amend their work post-publication, it can seem precious or even dishonest. That’s not the case here. Aviv’s openness to new perspectives (and her transparency about the process) makes her work richer and wiser than it already was ... Being a mother doesn’t make you better or more sage (see Munro). But in Aviv’s case, at least, it seems to have brought new depths to her already excellent journalism.
Sharp ... Aviv is an incisive and compassionate chronicler, just as capable of explaining hard science and practicing shoe-leather journalism as she is of accounting for more enigmatic elements, such as the impact of a mother’s experience with stillbirth on her surviving children. Readers will be impressed.
