How Motherhood Changed Rachel Aviv’s Writing

One summer, Rachel Aviv went away to sleepaway camp in Maine while her mother rented a house some hours away for a self-imposed writing retreat. In a scene that could be a playbook for Annie Baker’s film Janet Planet, the writer recounts calling her mother a few days into her time at camp to say she “was considering jumping into the lake and drowning.” Her mother picks her up, and the two spend the summer together, doing some writing, and some not writing. Her mother’s plans to conceive…