The Abandoners by Begoña Gómez Urzaiz review – absent mothers

The Abandoners by Begoña Gómez Urzaiz review – absent mothers

An idiosyncratic study of women who leave their children, from Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark to Joni Mitchell

When Begoña Gómez Urzaiz dropped her younger son off at nursery for the first time, her friends asked her if she had cried. “A little bit,” she fibbed, not wanting to confess that her overwhelming feeling was one of gratitude and relief. For a few blessed hours she would be free to get on with her work as a journalist, without determined little hands pulling the laptop socket out of the wall and a small voice insisting that it was time to play horses.

Urzaiz, who is based in Barcelona, lied because she didn’t want to come over as anything less than a perfect mother. This is Spain, after all: a country still sluiced by what she calls “the maternal idolatry imposed by the Francoist, national-Catholic agenda”. Divorce wasn’t even legal until 1981. Yet she admits that she’s always had a sneaky appetite for stories of women who abandon their children with nary a backward glance. Not that these are necessarily easy to find, a gap that Urzaiz sets out to fill in this wide-ranging survey.

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