Overview

What kind of mother abandons her child? During the pandemic, trapped at home with young children and struggling to find creative space to write, journalist Begoña Gómez Urzaiz became fixated on artistic women who overcame both society’s condemnation and their own maternal guilt to leave their children—at will or due to economic or other circumstances. The Abandoners is sharp, at times slyly humorous, and always deeply empathetic. Using famous examples such as Ingrid Bergman, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, and Maria Montessori as well as fictional ones like Anna Karenina and the many roles of Meryl Streep, and interrogating modern trends like “momfluencers,” Gómez Urzaiz reveals what our judgement of these women tells us about our judgement of all women.

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9781324079477

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Reviews

"""Begoña Gómez Urzaiz has written the best kind of book: the one you didn’t know you were craving until it appeared. The Abandoners is a self-interrogative, intricately perceptive look at the buried tradition of women leaving their children: it’s about the impossibility, pleasure, and torture embedded in motherhood, and the line—elusive when it entangles the facts of money, work, mistakes, and desire—between objective necessity and personal choice. I absolutely inhaled it."" -- Jia Tolentino ""A very richly interesting exploration of a complex subject. Begoña Gómez Urzaiz tells the stories of all these different women with such intelligence and wit and generosity."" -- Tessa Hadley ""With her luminous and insightful craft, Begoña Gómez Urzaiz manages to find a fascinating and often liberating niche ... by falling in and out the lives of women who have tackled the dark corners of motherhood and the taboos of abandonment. This is literary nonfiction at its best: full of autonomous ideas, intuitions, and confidence, and yet a subtleness ... where the I of the author becomes a thread and not the whole texture. Probably the best book I’ve read on the implications of motherhood and its opposites after Sheila Heti’s Motherhood."" -- Claudia Durastanti"

"""Begona Gómez Urzaiz has written the best kind of book: the one you didn’t know you were craving until it appeared. The Abandoners is a self-interrogative, intricately perceptive look at the buried tradition of women leaving their children: it’s about the impossibility, pleasure, and torture embedded in motherhood, and the line—elusive when it entangles the facts of money, work, mistakes, and desire—between objective necessity and personal choice. I absolutely inhaled it."" -- Jia Tolentino ""A very richly interesting exploration of a complex subject. Begoña Gómez Urzaiz tells the stories of all these different women with such intelligence and wit and generosity."" -- Tessa Hadley ""With her luminous and insightful craft, Begona Gómez Urzaiz manages to find a fascinating and often liberating niche ... by falling in and out the lives of women who have tackled the dark corners of motherhood and the taboos of abandonment. This is literary nonfiction at its best: full of autonomous ideas, intuitions, and confidence, and yet a subtleness ... where the I of the author becomes a thread and not the whole texture. Probably the best book I’ve read on the implications of motherhood and its opposites after Sheila Heti’s Motherhood."" -- Claudia Durastanti"

Author Information

Begoña Gómez Urzaiz is a freelance journalist living in Barcelona who writes frequently for outlets including La Vanguardia and El País. She co-presents Amiga Date Cuenta, a podcast on culture and feminism, for Radio Primavera Sound, and teaches literary journalism in the master’s program at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Lizzie Davis is an editor and translator whose recent projects include Juan Cárdenas’s The Devil of the Provinces, longlisted for the National Book Award.

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