Writer Rachel Aviv explores the complexity of the mother-daughter bond

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"Did police ever call you? Not once." "Listen to Weeky Bus Safe, a new true crime series on the embedded podcast from NPR." "This is fresh air, I'm Tanya Mosley." In 1980, a young woman sat down at her typewriter while her baby slept and tried to become a writer. She wanted to write something that mattered, a Madam Bovery. Instead, most days, she folded laundry or fell asleep.

That woman was my guest mother, writer Rachel Aviv, who would grow up to become a writer herself for the New Yorker.

Aviv's new book is a collection of stories about mothers and daughters. She first wrote them for the New Yorker,

a young teacher who experienced a mysterious condition that caused her to forget who she was, disappearing for days at a time. A Filipino woman who left her nine children to raise someone else's in the U.S. When she wrote them the first time, Aviv identified with the daughters without quite realizing it. Then she became a mother herself, went back and saw how much of the mother she'd missed.

The book is called "You Won't Get Free of It." Stories of mothers and daughters. Rachel Aviv is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where she writes about medicine, mental illness, and criminal justice. She won a national magazine award for her profiles, and this year she was a Pulitzer finalist for a story about patients missed diagnosed with schizophrenia, who turned out to have a treatable autoimmune disease.

The New York Times named her first book "Strangers to Ourselves," one of the best books of 2022.

Rachel Aviv, welcome to Fresh Air. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you for writing this book. I really enjoyed it, and I want to start off our conversation. By having you read from the preface of the book, because the very personal and journalistic turn you've taken,

“you really lay out here toward a mother's point of view. Can I have you read that excerpt?”

Yeah. The novelist Yey Only writes that the essence of growing up is to play hide and seek with one's mother successfully. In this book, I have chosen stories originally published in the New Yorker of mother child pairs acting out this game. I wrote some of these stories feeling existentially like a daughter, and now I have returned to them with a different identification. It was as if I had failed to see the drama on the mother's side to her particular longings and humiliations and needs. Thank you so much. I wanted to read that short excerpt, because I think it really encapsulates what you've done here.

And what's so fascinating to me is you wrote most of these stories before you had children, and then you return to them after.

When did you first notice it changing the way you read your own work that new experience identity of being a mother?

I was rereading the first piece I had written for the New Yorker when I was 28. And I was rereading it because for my last book I was writing about sort of issues related to psychiatric insight and the first story I wrote for the New Yorker really dealt with those issues. So I just wanted to reread my notes and sort of see what kind of information I had been collecting at that time. And as I was reading my interview notes, I noticed that the story is about a woman named Linda Bishop who refuses psychiatric care in a psychiatric hospital in New Hampshire leaves the hospital and ends up sort of subsisting on apples in an abandoned farmhouse.

“And in the story I remember, I had described her mental illness as sort of emerging out of nowhere after a happy harmonious childhood.”

And when I was reading my notes, I was struck that a friend of Linda has told me that she had given up a baby for adoption when she was in her late teens. And I was amazed that I had not mentioned that in the piece that that detail had not registered as an important life event. So that was the first moment that I became just aware of kind of the instability of my own authority in a way or sort of how much my life experience was shaping the kind of questions I was asking and the curiosities I had. I actually want to talk about the first story, so it's about a young woman named Hannah up.

And for people who don't know her, tell us who she was, and this mysterious condition she had, this is so seed of fugustained.

She'd been gone for five days and they called the police and the police began searching for her throughout Manhattan.

“And no one could find her and it became a kind of New York City news story where everyone was searching for this young teacher.”

And after three weeks, she surfaced in the water of the Hudson River and she had no memory of what she'd been doing or where she was or even no understanding that three weeks had passed. She was eventually diagnosed with disassociative fugue, which is a really rare species of disassociation where people kind of embark on these long journeys. And lose access to their personal history and sometimes they kind of emerge after months or years and don't know why they have sort of assumed a new name and a new job and a new home.

And over the course of ten years, she had two more fugues in which she disappeared. I started writing about her when she had disappeared for the third time and that was in St. Thomas.

And after that third fugue, she was never found.

I mean, this condition is astounding. This disassociative fugue state. It's rare, but it happens. Is this another, you know, back in the 80s and the 90s there was a preoccupation with amnesia and people leaving their lives and then showing up somewhere else as someone else and not having any understanding of like who they were prior and that trauma is what typically caused it. This is kind of like a definitive diagnosis for something like that.

“Yeah, and I think it's really compromised by that era in the 80s and the 90s in which people recovering memories of abuse and later it was sort of understood that these memories were often unreliable and that it was a sort of moment of hysteria.”

And I think disassociation in general, like a bad reputation because of that. And the field wasn't really able to kind of preserve the aspects of disassociation that were sort of enduring and didn't relate to that particular cultural moment.

That was sort of disassociation manifesting as this almost like cultural syndrome, but disassociation has always existed and been observed. And I think psychiatrists have been kind of tentative.

In part because it does have that sort of mystical with. There is a detail that you've left out of the first essay. It is also about the loss of a baby. So before Hannah was born, her mother Barbara had given birth to a baby too early and that baby only lived a day.

“And Hannah's disappearances kept happening around that baby's birthday. And now you cut that out the first time in that first essay because you felt it was too symbolic. What made you trust it the second time?”

I think there was some feeling that it felt too sentimental or almost a cliche. And I think, on one level, I feel like this sort of grudging acceptance that there's a reason cliches become cliches. There we go. On the other hand, I think it almost felt like it couldn't be true. And I think maybe one of the things that I was interested in when I went back to it was the way that it didn't really matter how true it was the first time. Then it sort of installs itself as this family myth. And the story that Hannah has these fuchs at the same time of year as her mother's lost baby does sort of work on the people. You know, works on Hannah, it works on her mother and maybe then it influences it in its own way.

Because just to make a point of clarity, the mother Barbara helped this as a belief for herself that every time my daughter Hannah disappears, it's around my first baby's birthday. So she took meaning into this. So right, like how much did Hannah absorb about that fact or was she responding to her mother becoming depressed at that time of year? Oh, you know, maybe her mother had been feeling depressed always around that time of year, which would completely make sense. And Hannah grew up with a particular sort of mood around that time of year, which then influenced

What does that tell you about the deep connections between mothers and daughters? Because on one hand, journalistically, I could see why you would cut that out. I mean, I think a journalist might think it's too much of a coincidence or it's kind of woo woo this idea that there's some sort of psychic connection there.

“Yes, you know, I guess I think that's what it was. Thank you for saying that. I think I think it felt too mystical to woo woo.”

And it felt like the umbilical cord was still there on some level. Like that you cannot separate the mothers sort of cycles and traumas from the daughter's way of moving through the world. And it felt like by whatever chain of response,

it was occurring, it had been sort of absorbed by Hannah on some level.

And whether it was a coincidence or not, didn't feel that meaningful because it had become a story that the family told and that acted on both mother and daughter. Let's talk a little bit about Alice Monroe. It is the last story in your book.

“You know, Alice Monroe is such a highly regarded writer. She's a Nobel Prize winning writer. Can you briefly tell us what came out about her for those that don't know and what you ended up writing about her?”

So in July 2024, there was an article in the Toronto Star about how Alice Monroe's daughter Andrea Skinner had been sexually abused by Alice Monroe's husband, Jerry Fremlin.

And Alice Monroe had kept that sort of never sufficiently acknowledged it to the degree that her daughter Andrea was estranged and could no longer sort of bear to be in her presence.

Monroe, she didn't just look away from her daughter, though. I mean, she used it. The abuse goes into the fiction. One of her daughter's Jenny has this devastating phrase that her mother put everything through

“a quote machine that turns things into gold. Can you talk a little bit for a moment what this had done to Andrea, what you found as you interviewed her and and delved into this story that it really spanned decades?”

So Andrea was sort of a fan of her mother's writing. She was proud of her mother's writing and there were some stories that were transparently about a sexualized daughter who is in pain and sort of sacrificed. And in first, Andrea felt, "Oh, this is great. My mother is dealing with it. She's processing it." And as time went on and Alice Monroe continued to write about it in various ways, Andrea saw that she wasn't actually processing it. She was using it. She was like turning it into amazing art. But it wasn't like it went one way. It was sort of channeling outward towards the work and not back inward towards her own understanding of what Andrea was experiencing. It was this incredible act of like

association in a way where she could play with the ideas as if they were just sort of interesting themes and yet these were the themes that for Andrea had sort of destroyed her young adulthood and childhood.

What was the most disturbing part of this story for you? There was one audio recording between Alice Monroe and her biographer.

And her biography did not mention the sexual abuse at all and she had asked for a meeting at a diner with her biographer and he recorded it but he didn't use it. And she basically said, "Yes, my husband's actually a beauty Andrea, it's awful. But I will be destroyed if anyone knows it will become who I am. I've worked so hard to be who I am and I can't give that up." And it was just so stark and there's no excuse she was even offering. It was just that. It was like I have traded my daughter for my career and my art.

This actually went to court. He pleaded guilty to the sex abuse and there is a moment where she Alice actually says her fear is that this would sort of take over her career that if people knew that she was with a man who abused a daughter like she wouldn't want this to cloud the story of her life.

I was thinking about the quote you won't get free of it, which is a quote from one of her short stories where she describes a mother who was abandoned her children for a man.

“And I think the era in which she was working was important. It was very rare for a woman to leave a man and sort of pursue her career and to speak to her about the 70s, right?”

So what she was doing felt new and felt brave and in a way it was almost as if in the spirit of feminism or whatever, as she felt she was justified and freeing herself from the burden of her daughter's abuse. And I was just struck that she felt she would not get free of that abandonment of a child or she articulated that in a story and that has become her legacy that she is not free of the way that she abandoned her daughter. As a short story writer, were you yourself a fan of Alice Minrose writing? It was interesting. I've written about artists or writers who have done things that really complicate their legacy or their work and I did find myself feeling more respect for Alice Minrose sort of craft and writing and

The stories were not fading for me. They were incredible works of art for me.

It felt like the moral universe is such that you would think that there should be some sort of shift in her career and her writing. And she'd be punished aesthetically for turning her daughter's abuse into art, but the strange thing was the work got better.

It was more complex. It was more fraught and tense and sort of written from multiple perspectives. It wasn't better morally, but aesthetically maybe it was.

“How do you sit with that? I guess you don't read writing because the person is good. I don't know. I think I was less interested when I was writing the piece about sort of what to do with her legacy.”

Like what to do with sort of the bad artist or the monster artist and just more interested in how the monstrous acts sort of was converted into this new form that she almost created. What had been the feedback though, especially from maybe feminist writers, those who kind of held her to an extremely high esteem, you know, she won the Nobel Prize, which speaks to something greater about a person's character, not only just the writing, but you know, who they are is embedded in their writing in a way that we, we hail, we see is like aspirational.

“Did you receive any feedback from your writing the first time it published?”

I think the initial news of Alice Monroe's silencing of the abuse was the moment when a lot of people who had seen her as this feminist icon felt a real sense of tragedy and almost heartbreak. And I was upset to find that as I reported the story, what Alice Monroe had done seemed in a way worse than I had expected, like it wasn't then I was finding justifications and sort of reasons it was actually even more cold than I had expected. Her reaction to her daughter being abused. Yeah, it felt quite cold and yet her two other daughters, like just felt that she unconditionally loved them.

I didn't doubt at all that her other two daughters felt that love and yeah Andrea felt her mother had been totally stony toward her. And it was moving and sort of tragic to understand that Monroe had had her own childhood experiences of abuse and sort of had conditioned herself to deal with it in this very compartmentalized way where she could not allow it to have been something like truly hurt in her life.

But then she sort of repeated that with her daughter where she was sort of like aren't you over this already like like couldn't understand that this was still the defining trauma for Andrea's life. Her guest today is writer Rachel Avie from the New Yorker. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley and this is Fresh Air.

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She won a national magazine award for her profiles. And this year she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for story about patients misdiagnosed with schizophrenia who turn out to have a treatable autoimmune disease.

Her first book Strangers To Ourselves is one of the best books of 2022 on several lists including The New York Times.

Her new one is a collection of essays called You Won't Get Free of It. Stories of mothers and daughters. I do want to ask you about a mother and daughter bond that spans the ocean. It's about this woman named Emma and your essay as if they were my daughters. Tell us who Emma is. I met Emma at an advocacy organization for Filipino domestic workers. Emma had come from the Philippines.

She had nine daughters and she couldn't longer support them so she moved to New York City and she became an Annie for other people's children. And when I met her and some of her friends, I was amazed to see how kind of casually and how normal it had become that they were going years even decades without seeing their children.

They had made this incredible sacrifice that in order to support their own children and to allow them to live full lives.

They need to abandon them essentially and come to America and take care of other people's children. This is a phenomenon that's just heartbreaking and Emma kept this notebook of the books that she loved and then she would mail them to her daughter in the Philippines. Roxanne to read to her grandson and there's a thing that Emma had to do herself to survive this job. She had to kind of like transfer her love for her own children onto the children that she was taking care of.

“She calls it displacement and could you just talk a little bit about what that displacement looked like?”

I mean, she became like a surrogate mother for these other children and she also found herself with so much more time to kind of shower them with attention and sort of educational goods.

So her children were like, well, you know, why did you never read us books? Why are you reading this other child books and her children really struggled with holding these two facts?

One of which was that their mother went to America because she wanted the best for them and the second was that their mother was building a new life away from them and they had no contact with her except through Facebook. So they couldn't help but feel jealous of these sort of American toddlers who were receiving their mother's love.

So you changed the ending a bit. So what did not only rename it, but like re-ending it, what did that let you see that you couldn't see the first time or you saw, but like you will admit it for the first time.

“I think the way I rewrote it was thinking about the kind of fantasy of reunion. It was about Emma's desire to reunite with her children and her children's desire to reunite with her and they had this fantasy of what that would be like.”

And there was a way in which I was sort of thinking about it as more of a universal fantasy that there is this like space of safety and being held and cared for that everyone holds as this like almost primitive fantasy and I think I was aware of how unreachable it was in Emma's life both because she didn't plan to come back home. And also this strange thing happened where she felt like she was self-actualizing. Like she actually was enjoying herself. She was making friends and she didn't know that she wanted to go back to the old life and her children didn't know anymore.

What it even felt like to be in a physical space of their mother. So this idea of the reunion became more and more abstract and sort of fantastical. And I think I wanted to capture that more.

And to end on that note because it felt continuous with sort of many of the other hopes or fantasies in the other pieces. I see the thread in a few of the essays of like these mothers reaching towards self-actualization of being a person outside of being a mother and the challenges, the cost of that.

It's an old story but it's not one that like we talk about in contemporary times because now we kind of have this falsehood that like you can have it all, you know.

In the beginning of the book I talk about how I noticed that two pieces I'd written had almost the same scene. One was about the philosopher Martha Nussbaum. There was about the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus and somehow I had written paragraphs that were very similar that were both about how they were either giving birth to a baby or trying to get pregnant. And they refused to step away from their work. Like they Martha Nussbaum brought philosophy texts to read, so she could sort of prove to everyone that she had not changed.

Sort of still the same hard working star that she'd always been.

“I think what I was struck by was how much I was sort of romanticizing that idea that like you become a mother and you remain like stoically the same.”

And I don't know why that was such a value but it was and I remember I had my editor at the New Yorker was like you're not actually that happy now. You're trying to stay the same. And I remember thinking that was a really good point but like it wasn't also, it wasn't penetrating me. Can you kind of talk a little bit about what you were thinking before you became a mother and then how you're thinking kind of evolved from this binary overblown way of thinking. It's a really good book called Transformative Experiences by the Philosopher Ali Paul and I remember reading that when I was pregnant and it's kind of about how you cannot possibly make a decision to have a child that is rational because the conditions of your life and your understanding of values will change so radically that like it sort of explodes the idea of a reason decision and she compares it to the decision to become a vampire.

“I think I found that like incredibly frightening maybe because like I had spent so much time as a young adult like feeling like I needed to establish this identity and then kind of cling to it nervously.”

I guess I look back on that and it's not that I feel I'm so changed. I probably wish I were changed more but I do think. I do think that sort of holding on to sameness feels like the behavior of someone who is frightened. And I would love to know what Martha Nussbaum and Elizabeth Loft is think now about what they were doing during birth. Like at the time I kind of glorified it or romanticized it and I would like they're they're both you know in their 70s or 80s I would like to know if they think they were too brittle and that they were too afraid of change and that they didn't realize how long life actually was.

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Gather seven stories of mothers and daughters essay she first reported for the magazine. I want to talk about something that you wrote about in the preface of your first book strangers to ourselves and it is about when you were six and you stopped eating.

And you were six years old so you had never really heard the word anorexia but became they told you later the youngest child ever hospitalized for it.

“Can you tell me what you what you remember most about that time in your life?”

I remember the children that I was with that it was sort of this old school like anorexia ward where I was surrounded by older slightly older girls like 12 fell old to me because I was six and I remember learning from them and understanding what anorexia was not because I was sort of bringing the pallet of symptoms to the table but because they were telling me things like. You know you're supposed to exercise that's how you burn calories or like do jumping jacks.

Look at your stomach. These things and it was such a strange kind of competitive environment in which.

Girls who all had some form of related distress were put together and then began to express that distress and increasingly similar ways. And you're learning from each other you're learning these bad habits from each other yeah can you can you talk just a little bit about what what you remember about yourself when you stopped eating and what what you were telling yourself about about not eating. I think I felt very proud of myself like I had done this very this like severe act of self discipline and and.

That there was something like noble and it was proof of my sort of strong individuality so I think.

“I knew it was bothering everyone but I must have felt like on some level they secretly respected it because I think that's how I felt about myself for a while that like I had shown have strong I was.”

Do you remember what you were responding to. Well it's hard because you know I had like child therapy and there were theories floated then that I have now taken as my own. But I think yeah I think not eating is like the most profound way to separate yourself. Actually I mean that comes from my therapist I remember her saying as a child that like and it was overwrought and she was like this train is a psychoanalyst but I was sick so it's sort of ill fitting.

“But I remember her saying like the mother symbolizes milk and you're rejecting the mother being sort of inserting your own boundaries.”

And the I don't know about the milk part but that has some resonance. Right about this it's the preface of the book so it's just the way for us to enter then these stories about mental health and mental illness and in the same way that you do this with the story of you and your mother for this latest book. But I wondered how that experience shaped your interests in these under explored but also pretty complicated stories because you don't really shy away from stories that don't give a clean you know narrative.

I often think I mean I after I was released from the hospital after six weeks I was required to go to therapy three times a week so that was from first grade to fifth grade like three times a week 45 minutes each.

A certain way of talking about the mind and thinking about the mind and not assuming that the surface layer of behavior is true or sort of always like feeling that there is.

Something underneath that surface layer or that there are conflicted feelings it just gave me a different kind of language for appreciating like how how complex people's minds are so I sometimes think that those five years of therapy which I found like humiliating and invasive.

“Really shaped the way I think about people because so much of your writing it kind of sits on the edges of.”

Of mental illness and brain science in particular I think I heard you say it was an op-it where you said that a woman once told you that describing her mental illness is like describing a dog's bark to someone who never seen a dog.

Tell me about what intrigues you most about trying to bring language to that experience to mental illness in particular.

I have thought about that so much and I think that woman who said that to me shaped so much of the way I approach sort of psychological experience because especially with psychiatry. It is so hard to communicate the experience and so you kind of reach for the available language and when you reach for that available language you are also kind of distorting the original experience you had because it's like conforming or mapping on to symptoms or psychiatric language.

It feels like there's a core of distressing experience that we sometimes aren't bothering to articulate because we're relying on the diagnostic language or the kind of advocacy language.

“I think with sexual abuse that was an experience I had where you know someone can say I felt violated and that feels familiar and of course it's like getting to the heart of it.”

But there was a way in which Andrea Alice Monroe's daughter spoke and which I felt like it was just appreciating like the corrosive nature of not just the abuse but sort of what it means to sort of not be able to speak about that abuse and that there is value in trying to describe it in part because other people kind of gives language to other people who feel like they're the only ones in the world who have this experience. You know books come out and they speak to a particular moment. What do you think your book in this particular moment is sort of telling us or allowing us to see about ourselves.

Why meditate particularly on stories of mothers and daughters in this moment and in ways that complicate our notions or what we traditionally read about mother daughter relationships. I mean motherhood is definitely politicized in ways that become very binary and simplistic and I have thought a lot about sort of how to write in this particular moment because everything is happening so fast and nothing rises to the level of corruption that is sort of happening right in front of us like whatever you're uncovering.

It kind of spells no one's hiding anything anymore in a way and I guess I'm just like it's been a struggle for me and for other journalists some friends with to sort of think about what constitutes the story these days.

“I think like complicated stories that hold different viewpoints that don't take the kind of expected predictable argument are something to hold on to and that feel at risk.”

And so I don't want to write stories where I know the answer from the beginning or where I know what the argument is going to be. I like to really feel uncertain until the piece is done. Rachel Aviv, thank you so much for this book in this conversation. Thank you so much. Rachel Aviv's new essay collection is called you won't get free of it stories of mothers and daughters coming up TV critic John Powers reviews the new comedy series Alice and Steve this is fresh air. So just Candace Rogers studies how tech affects kids and you might be surprised by what her research reveals when you compare all the factors that contribute to youth mental health social media often doesn't make the list it's one of the least influential factors in predicting mental health.

So you're driving to work or you're on a walk or you're at the gym or whatever and you just need to clear your head that's the perfect time to hit the play button on NPR's all songs considered it's not the news it's not work or whatever else is weighing you down.

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What are we doomed helps you understand humanity's biggest threats time and change pandemics of their weapons stuff still hits planets.

We stand divided we fall. How worried should you actually beat and what can we do. I'm Ben Bradford join me for all we do our NPR network listen now wherever you get your podcasts. The offbeat new comedy Alice and Steve tells the story of decades old friends who have a bitter falling out when Steve gets romantic. Steve gets romantically involved with Alice's 20 something daughter. Critic at large John Powers says the show drove him crazy in a lot of ways but it's best moments kept him watching.

I grew up watching episodic shows on network TV. Nearly all of them form your leg but some indelibly great.

“Then like everyone else I moved into the days of what my colleague David B. and Cooley dubbed Platinum TV where series like the sopranos and the wire and flea bag aspired to something higher.”

What both these areas had in common was that their shows were carefully crafted. They had an internal logic and a tone that held them together. In recent years though, there's been a proliferation of shows that possibly obeying some algorithm, care less for coherence than sensation. They lurch among tones from cuteness to sentimentality to meanness,

stirring in random plot twists along the way. Bouncing all over the emotional map, these shows depend on compelling actors and a few memorable scenes to make us overlook their loose construction. A great example is Allison Steve, an entertaining but sometimes exasperating six-part British comedy on Hulu,

“about 250 something best friends who turn on each other after he gets involved with her 26-year-old daughter.”

While the premise is juicy, it's also a tadyyucky. And I mainly tune in because its title characters are played by performers Germain Clement from Flight of the Concords, and Nicola Walker, who might have raved up on this show more than once. The series starts poorly with Steve and Alice going on a cutesy bender after a friend's funeral.

Now, I always hate drunk scenes, which are an invitation to overact.

As Clement and Walker brave their lines, we learn that Steve's a divorce celebrity hairstylist who can't find a girl friend. Well, Alice is a closed designer, with a doding younger husband nicely played by Joel Frye, a sweetie pie of a teenage son, this time he's eaten dice, and of course that 26-year-old daughter, Izzy, who's inherited her mother's willfulness. Played by Yale Topo, Margalite, Izzy kicks starts the plot by flirting with Steve. Predictably, he succumbs. Almost immediately, they think they're in love. Well, the weak-willed Steve wants to hide their romance.

He knows it's inappropriate. Izzy just blurt out the facts to her mom. Alice flips, and from here on in this series where the women are as alpha as the men are hangdog, Alice drives the action. But trade and violently angry, she'll do whatever it takes to break them up, no matter who gets hurt. Her antics unleash Steve's own malice. We're in beef territory. Here, early on, Stephen Izzy are walking to a dinner party organized by Alice, who's pretending to have buried the hatchet.

You do realize this is probably a trap. Oh, she could be trying to walk out? Yeah, yeah. No, you're right, this is definitely a trap. Yeah, do you think Daniel's going to punch me?

Right, so if Daniel would ever punch anyone, maybe we could show her that this is a good thing. I like her best friend, and how nice that she already really really loves the guy I'm dating. Hmm, yeah. Okay. You know this. Yeah, terrified.

At its core, Alice and Steve hinges on the way that platonic friendships are often richer and more powerful than romantic ones.

I wanted her to dig deeper.

While the show's got some very funny bits, Alice's sharp tongue mother is a blast. It's often annoyingly lacks.

“If Steve really does the hair of Charlie XCX, how come he's a clueless older guy who's pop culture references are really Nelson and Woody Allen?”

If as he truly adores her mother as she claims, why does she keep her rubbing her relationship with Steve and her mom's face? Halfway through, one character nukes the other's career, but this life-shattering event has no real weight. It's barely even mentioned for the rest of the series.

That said, Alice and Steve as we're seeing, for scenes like the one in which Steve spinously sells Izzy out,

or the last rating discussion between Alice and her husband when he fully grasp that he adores a woman who views him as a reliable but dull concierge. Not a man she likes hanging with. Most touching of all may be the lovely sequence when Alice, why is for once? Smooth romantic crisis between her son and his would be girlfriend, a pair who are the show's emblem of hope.

“For once, we understand why people love her.”

Well, most viewers will find Steve more likeable than Alice. The show takes pains not to make him a pure predatory or creepy. The role doesn't give Clement a whole lot to do, except play variations on shambolic dread and discomfort.

The show gets its galvanizing zing from Walker, a beloved star in England with amazing luminous eyes.

Her Alice is the kind of complicated volcanic heroine that you don't see in movies, and rarely see on TV, one who shows her apocalyptic rage freely, and in many different forms. At least once in every episode, something would lead me to say, "Man is this show a mess." But that wasn't a deal breaker. I kept watching. After all, life is messy too.

John Powers reviewed the series Alice and Steve now streaming on Hulu. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. You can now also watch some of our interviews on YouTube at this is Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham,

engineering help today from Adam Stanishewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced in edited by Phyllis Myers, and Marie Boldenado, Lauren Crimson, Theresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Julia Challenor, Susan Yuckundy, Annabellman, and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper, Roberta Shorock directs the show.

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