The pain that remains sinks into the depths and resurfaces in other forms. The stories of Rachel Aviv

Faced with a mother and daughter who resemble one another – not only physically, but in their style of dress, their hairstyles and their gait – it is easy to give in to the impulse to imagine that the mother has moulded her daughter; perhaps she forced her to take dance lessons, or projected her own unfulfilled dreams onto her. Then one’s own mother comes to mind – the idiosyncrasies we’ve inherited, those we’ve rejected and even those we’ve brought upon ourselves – and we find ourselves overwhelmed by the inevitability of this transmission, be it a poor metabolism, a fear of mopeds, or worse. Yiyun Li writes: “The essence of growing up is playing hide-and-seek with your mother and managing not to be found”. The quote is cited by Rachel Aviv in the foreword to her book The Pain That Remains: Stories of Mothers and Daughters (Iperborea, translated by Elisa Banfi).

Rachel Aviv became a writer because her mother was obsessed with The New Yorker. The Pain That Remains brings together seven stories, published by Aviv in The New Yorker – her mother’s dream. They are stories of trauma and mental illness, but above all of mothers and daughters: that primordial, tangled and inescapable psychological bond, which Aviv felt the need to revisit following the transformative experience of motherhood.

Whilst rereading her notes for a story written before she turned thirty – the one about Linda Bishop, a woman with a psychiatric diagnosis who starved to death in an unoccupied house – she realised she had omitted the fact that, as a young woman, Bishop had given birth to a son who was immediately put up for adoption. She had also omitted a detail regarding Hannah Upp, who, from time to time, during episodes of dissociative fugue, would disappear – sometimes for months – without retaining any memory of what she had done. This always happened at the time of year when her mother had given birth to a baby who died shortly afterwards.

All the essays in this book focus on the traces left by pain, on the trauma that is unconsciously passed down and resurfaces elsewhere, transformed. There is the submerged pain and displaced love of Emma, a Filipino migrant who left her homeland to ensure her daughters a life of dignity; that of Mary, who has recovered from psychosis but has become unrecognisable to her daughters (Aviv was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for this story); and the pain reworked and distorted in memory by Elizabeth Loftus, the famous psychologist who has dedicated her life precisely to demonstrating just how changeable and unreliable memory is. Finally, there is the story of Alice Munro, who kept silent about her partner’s abuse of her daughter Andrea so as not to risk her whole life being reduced to that trauma. A victim of violence herself, she sublimated the abuse of Andrea into her short stories, ‘turning life’s difficulties into gold’, as Jenny, another of Munro’s daughters, tells Rachel Aviv.

The trust the interviewees place in her is striking: during these intense conversations, they themselves come to understand something new about themselves, which Aviv conveys through her writing with clarity, modesty and without judgement. As a child, Aviv suffered from anorexia, and the long course of psychotherapy – described as intrusive and humiliating – shaped her life and the purpose of her work: to convey an ineffable experience such as mental illness. She is drawn to stories with an unstable point of view, and knows that the mother-daughter relationship, more than any other, defies a fixed perspective. Faced with the realisation that ‘the little girl who endures certain things becomes an adult who, in turn, inflicts wounds – without even knowing which ones – for which, years later, she will be asked to repent’, attempting to bring to light the traces of the pain that remains is a courageous endeavour to reclaim the fragments we have separated from ourselves because they are too heart-wrenching, and to make sense of them, until we can piece them back together and become whole again.