Rachel Aviv revised several essays in her book, "You Won't Get Free Of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters," to address the mother's role in the mother-daughter relationship. The book collects six essays that were originally published in The New Yorker.

Aviv wrote in the book's preface that when she originally wrote some of the collected stories, she felt "existentially like a daughter." She described revising certain essays to redress what she perceived as an imbalance in representing the mother's perspective within the relationship. Aviv stated, "The mother-daughter relationship, perhaps more than any other, seems to defy a fixed point of view."

Aviv's initial piece for The New Yorker, titled "God Knows Where I Am," was written when she was 28 years old. The article focused on Linda Bishop, a woman who experienced a psychotic break and lived in an abandoned farmhouse, subsisting on apples. Bishop's best friend informed Aviv that Bishop had been pregnant before college and had given up the baby, a detail Aviv chose not to include in the published version of "God Knows Where I Am."

After rediscovering this information in interview transcripts, Aviv contacted Bishop's sister to inquire about the baby. Aviv noted that there are two other stories in her book where parents experience the loss of their babies. Aviv said she had previously "breezed past" the events of lost babies in earlier publications of those stories. In related developments, Aviv's mother discovered a collection of her own journals from the late 1970s and early 1980s while moving, and she granted Aviv permission to read them.