Lucy McKeon | Pioneer Works Broadcast | July 8, 2026 | 3,237 words Award-winning _New Yorker_ writer Rachel Aviv recently published a collection of essays about the relationships between mothers and daughters. She talked to Lucy McKeon about her longstanding interest in stories about families and about revisiting old topics through new lenses: > You write in the preface about your own experience of this. Not only in your relationship to your own mother, which I want to ask you about, but you describe revisiting some of these stories, years after first reporting and writing them, now as a more experienced writer, and a mother yourself.
Through new insight, and in some cases encountering details you’d previously overlooked, you decided to make some revisions. I wonder how it felt to look back on this work by a younger version of yourself. > I think I was most surprised by how one’s curiosity changes—by the moments where I realized I had failed to be curious. And where my present-day self would have identified a particular episode or trauma as foundational, I had breezed past it [back then].
It was about age, it was about being a different kind of writer, maybe. I kept noticing that I had omitted lost babies or dead babies—in three different stories. It fundamentally wasn’t registering to me as a significant life event.
Those are some of the things that I felt newly attentive to, that I couldn’t just leave be. I felt I needed to address [them]. Asian Mothers, Bad Feelings: Notes on An All-conquering Stereotype “A certain image of the tiger mom— strict, cold and demanding—is ubiquitous in popular culture.
Why?” Megan O’Grady | The Yale Review | March 16, 2026 | 4,992 words “Motherhood reshaped how I see shame, art, and the female body.” Traci Brimhall | Virginia Quarterly Review | February 12, 2026 | 2,731 words Tagged: Alice Munro,daughters,essays,Lucy McKeon,motherhood,Pioneer Works Broadcast,rachel aviv,Writing . And if you want Longreads in your inbox, select the newsletters you want to receive: Tuesdays and Thursdays, we'll send you our latest originals and all our editor's picks—and Fridays, go even deeper with our Top 5 of the Week. We've depended on readers like you from the very beginning—and now more than ever.
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