If Rachel Aviv Weren’t a Writer, She’d Be a Psychologist

Rachel Aviv’s new book, You Won’t Get Free of It, is available now from Alfred A. Knopf, so we asked her a few questions about writer’s block, writing routines, favorite books, and more.

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What was the first book you fell in love with?
There were a lot of YA novels I fell in love with (everything by Katherine Paterson), but as an adult I think the first novel was Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road. I haven’t read that book since college, and I think it would not actually age well—I read all of Yates’s other books, hoping for the same experience as I had with Revolutionary Road, but it didn’t happen. At age twenty, though, I somehow felt that his description of a marriage in the 1950s explained everything to me about my high school/college relationship and basically my soul. I couldn’t function after reading it.

I interned at the Village Voice the summer after college, and my boss was Ed Park, and he gave me amazing book recommendations. As an expression of my admiration for him, I decided I needed to give him my copy of Revolutionary Road. But I was too ashamed of all the notes I’d written in the margins (I remember one involving some sort of feminist reading of the embroidered eggs on the wife’s apron), so I bought a new copy and pretended it was the one I already owned, and I remembered him remarking on how “clean” my copy was—he sensed something was fishy.

Which book(s) do you reread?
Wants by Grace Paley. Human Relationships by Natalia Ginzburg. I’ve read most Janet Malcolm books a few times.

If you weren’t a writer, what would you do instead?
This used to be easy for me to answer: a psychologist. I made moves to apply to clinical psychology PhD programs for a few years. Now I’m sort of disturbed to realize that maybe this is no longer the right backup plan. Over the years, I’ve found that having deep, penetrating conversations with people is mentally depleting enough that it’s hard for me to imagine how I would maintain my brain when fitting six or seven of those conversations into one work day.

How do you tackle writers block?
I have a kind of rule for myself related to this. Sometimes I will spend an inordinate amount of time writing and rewriting a particular paragraph or section and the work seems to be going nowhere. I think I’ve gradually discovered that the problem is not the language of that paragraph or section—I need to look at what’s coming right before that paragraph, because I must be trying to smash ideas into a paragraph or section in a way that the structure is not enabling. Or maybe I actually just don’t know what I’m wanting to say. But the problem does not lie with the sentences.

This also connects to the sad truth that the effort put into a piece of writing does not necessarily correlate with its quality. Sometimes the pieces I’ve devoted the most hours to writing are the ones that are weakest, because I was more dependent on the writing to try to plug up a larger problem with the story itself.

What time of day do you write?
I am profoundly a morning person. I feel I have a different personality in the morning. I really wish I could stretch that personality so that it lasted the rest of the day.

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You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters by Rachel Aviv is available from Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.