A collection of reported stories that explore the relationship between mothers and daughters by the award-winning author of Aviv renders one mother searching for her vanished daughter; another who sacrifices herself for her daughters by working as a nanny for other people’s children. In the final story, about the writer Alice Munro’s family, a daughter’s abuse is erased by her family, only to be recast by her mother in stories celebrated around the world. <You Won''t Get Free of It< is an astonishing exploration of the competing dynamics of knowing and unknowing, recognition and refusal, that shape this foundational relationship. Illuminating ineffable registers of human experience, Aviv asks piercing questions about how disowned knowledge can form and deform a family and a life.

Autorentext

Rachel Aviv

Leseprobe
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Second Life

When Christine Janumala was nine years old, her mother, Mary, said, “Come here. I want to tell you a secret.” They sat together on a brown couch in their living room, in Santa Ana, California. Mary, who was forty-three, said that a man she had known in medical school, a professor, was sending her messages about a plan to take her away and live in a mansion. “I remember feeling really excited, because that fit with my sense of what should be happening,” Christine said. “I was really into Harry Potter and the idea that, if you are part of the select, you can see a bigger story happening out there.”

Mary leaned over and began separating strands of Chris­tine’s hair, as if searching for lice. “Does he put listening devices in your hair?” Mary asked, about the professor. “Does he ever ask you to say things to me?”

Christine, the older of two sisters, believed everything about the professor until her mother suggested that Christine was part of his scheme. Mary had always been tender and dot­ing and practical. Christine saw her as a “magical, glowing fig­ure.” She said, “I just had this feeling in my body that she was not the same.”

Her sister, Angie, who was seven years younger, learned to follow their mother’s instructions, whether or not they made sense. She came to view her mother’s stories about the profes­sor, and about friends who were part of his mission, as akin to tales in the Bible. “It’s kind of like, OK, some of these people are real, and some of these people aren’t real,” Angie said.

Christine was often cast in the role of the villain. Her mother would yell at her for poisoning her pizza or hiding her keys or other menacing deeds, even as Christine tried to explain that she hadn’t done them. Sometimes Mary smacked her. (Mary doesn’t remember this.) Christine began to mistrust her own memory, too. “My mom would accuse me of things, and then I’d be, like, Maybe I did do these things,” she said. In fifth grade, she asked Santa Claus for a polygraph machine. “I just had this baseline sense of: I could be doubted at any time.”

She felt that people might help her mother if she could just find the right language to describe her transformation. By high school, Christine was spending so much time study­ing the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disor­ders that she texted a friend that she had actually “married the dsm-iv.” She explained that her mother suffered from the “fregoli delusion,” a belief that strangers were disguised as doubles of people she knew. In her journal, Christine wrote, “My mom has erotomanic delusion disorder with a splash of persecutory delusions.” She asked for help from teachers and a school counselor, but, she said, the “message I got was, basi­cally, Everybody has their shit, and you have to just deal with it and keep getting good grades.”

Mary, who was from India and had worked as a physician there for a decade, spoke so much about the professor that her husband, Chris, eventually found the professor’s number and called him. “He said, ‘I am not in contact with her,’ ” Chris recalled. “ ‘I didn’t even know your wife came to America.’ ” At the professor’s suggestion, Chris, who worked at the Cali­fornia Department of Motor Vehicles, scheduled a psychia­try appointment for Mary. Christine sat in the waiting room, hoping that this would be the beginning of getting back the mother of her early childhood. But when Mary finished the appointment, she said that the psychiatrist thought she was fine. Not long afterward, Mary kicked her husband out of the apartment and barricaded the door with a desk and two heavy suitcases. Christine and Angie allotted extra time to get to school each morning so that they could remove the obstacles.

Karl Jaspers, the German psychiatrist and philosopher, has described what he calls the “delusional atmosphere,” a profound alteration in the way people experience the world. “There is some change which envelops everything with a sub­tle, pervasive and strangely uncertain light,” he wrote. People in this state search for a story that explains why everything suddenly feels uncanny and ominous. The “vagueness of con­tent must be unbearable,” he wrote. “To reach some definite idea at last is like being relieved from some enormous burden.”

Mary had landed on a story that overwrote the reality of her daughters’ lives, but they also recognized in it a kind of emotional logic. Mary had been pressured to marry Chris, in an arranged match, and when they settled in America, he had traditional ideas about a woman’s role and restricted her freedom to pursue her career. Christine and Angie came to feel that their mother’s delusions—that her former colleague would free her from marriage and she’d be restored to her place in the medical community—were “a way of explaining how she ended up trapped in this position,” Christine said. “We theorized that psychosis was almost a reasonable response.”

Christine moved to New York after high school, because her favorite book, Underworld, by Don DeLillo, was set there, and because it seemed like the city where people went to escape their homes. She lived in the Bronx, near her father’s brother, and got a job at Planet Hollywood. She wanted to be a novelist and obsessively reread Underworld, covering the pages with determined annotations: “integrated dialogue”; “meta com­mentary”; “sensation of young immediacy.”

Angie and her mother would text Christine asking for gro­ceries or pizza, and she would order
the food for them from across the country. Mary was still barricading the door. Chris slept in his car. (Eventually, he moved in with a girlfriend.) Christine worried that Angie, who was eleven, was growing up in a kind of folie à deux, a delusional system that structures two lives. Angie said of her mother, “I could never figure out why she was doing these things to me, and I had this kind of emotional explanation: Other things are just more impor­tant to her. I’m only there as a vessel for the magical thinking.” After about a year, Christine arranged for her mother and Angie to move to New York so she could look after them.

Mary moved into an apartment in the Bronx, in the same building as her brother-in-law, and plastered the walls with tape, to prevent reality TV shows from recording her and Angie through the cracks. Angie tried to bathe while her mother was asleep, because Mary believed…