Begoña Gómez Urzaiz's The Abandoners, translated from the Spanish by Lizzie Davis, has an arresting focus. Having recently read Orna Donath's Regretting Motherhood, I was especially aware of what a taboo it is for a mother to say she regrets having her children, even if she never says this to the children themselves. But as Urzaiz rightly argues, there is a greater taboo: the mother who chooses to leave her children for the sake of her own self. Unfortunately, this is such a taboo that it trips up Urzaiz herself: almost all the case studies in the book are of famous dead women such as Doris Lessing, Maria Montessori and Muriel Spark, presumably because women who have done this do not want to talk about it if they don't have to. And it's only near the end of the book that Urzaiz starts thinking about women who leave their children for different reasons, focusing on a series of fascinating interviews she conducted with women who migrated to Spain from South or Central America, leaving children behind for some time. These women occupy a difficult space. They don't fit the 'selfish woman chooses career over children' norm because they migrated due to poverty and economic necessity, but they are also implicitly critiqued by Global North norms as well as being marginalised as migrants. It made me think of the African-Caribbean women who did the same thing in postwar Britain, leaving children to be raised by close kin in the West Indies so they could send money home, and how they were seen as bad mothers by the newly 'intimate' British welfare state.

This late expansion of what The Abandoners is about left me with more questions than answers. I liked Urzaiz's emotional honesty - she admits that she can't understand why somebody would leave their children even when she can see intellectual justifications for it. But it would have been great to see this focus on the primary mother-child bond historicised. It's only really since the Second World War that Global North countries have prioritised this attachment above all else. Leaving your children would not have carried the same emotional weight even in the nineteenth century (boarding schools?), let alone a couple of centuries back. I also kept thinking about infant adoption, a subject that Urzaiz only lightly touches on. Having your infant adopted seems to be the only socially acceptable way that a mother can leave her child in the twenty-first century Global North (it wouldn't be OK to have your older children adopted) and yet of course infant adoptions have been in decline precisely because of the new focus on the importance of the mother-infant connection, alongside expanding social support and acceptance of single mothers.

Urzaiz starts a conversation about an important topic, but there is so much more to say. 3.5 stars.

This was an interesting essay collection! It is a study of mothers who abandon children, mixing both real life and fictional stories, but mostly based on empirical method rather than actual theory research.

I was really looking forward to reading this book about mothers who abandon their children but it didn't really hit the spot for me. The book is a seroes of essays exploring both fictional and famous real life mothers who abandoned their child. The quality of essays varies and they are all highly observational and not in any way backed up by research. I'm not sure if something has been lost in translation but often the narrative was disjointed and seemed disorganised which impacted the flow of the prose and structure of the essay. The essays explore fictional mothers such as Anna Karenina and Sophie from Sophie's Choice and famous mothers such as Joni Mitchell, Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing who have given up or abandoned a child in some way. The writer (now she is herself a mother) claims not to understand how any mother could leave her child but does detail the ways in which society puts terribble pressure and guilt on mothers to perform their maternal dutoes an dis brutal in its critcicism of mothers who leave whilst not applying the same standards to fathers. The book is a bit of a "curate's egg." It really is one woman's opinion, not biography, not researched, just her thoughts and opinions and a lot of having to explain book plots and films to make her point.

This is a collection of essays by Begoña Gómez Urzaiz, a writer and journalist, about artistic women who abandoned their children.
I liked the opening chapter and the artisanal chapter the most.
Eventually, this was a 3 for me, because I wanted to like it more and came to my reading rendezvous with high expectations.
The selection of the topic and the themes is still a 5 stars for me, but when it comes to the execution, I found the narrative structure of the book a bit disorganised, Secondly, the balance between famous abandoners, the writers’ own insights and the information on fictional abandoning mothers were a bit off. Though, I must admit, if cinema were not one of my specialties, and had I not known of some of the stories of the mothers in this book, I could have benefited slightly more from it.

The writing style was a 4 star: it was mainly engaging and had a good pacing.
The structure and the prose affected each other.

The comparisons between the societal attitudes abandoning father and mothers were a nice reminder. I also enjoyed the writer’s own insights.
I am so grateful that she wrote about this theme, and I believe this is a useful book for those with especially prejudices towards who are vocal about the challenges of parenthood, first of all.

Just because of my expectations for a differently flowing narrative and more in-depth analysis, 3 for me, 3.5 for the newbies to the topic.

This is a loose investigation into cultures of motherhood written by someone who is a mother and who admits that she can't understand women who abandon their children, even while she openly admits the pressures and guilt that society presses on mothers but not fathers.

Urzaiz ranges widely between fictional representations of 'abandoners' such as the eponymous Sophie in [book:Sophie's Choice|917167] and Anna in [book:Anna Karenina|153]; and real women who had troubled relationships with their children and maternity itself such as [author:Doris Lessing|7728], [author:Muriel Spark|13093], [author:Mercè Rodoreda|42927] and Joni Mitchell.

I think, for my tastes, there was too much storytelling with extended explanations of the plots of the books and or films, and basic biography that I already knew. What is more interesting is how Urzaiz responds to these women, relating their behaviour to her own life and feelings. She is not, importantly, judgmental - even strangely empathetic, however much she equally cannot really conceive of how a mother can act as these women did.

In that sense this ends up being more conventional than I had, perhaps, expected. It falls between various categories as it's neither an academic analytical account nor biography, neither memoir nor structured investigation - perhaps extended essay is the way to file this. It would sit alongside other recent writings that engage with cultural constructions of femininity and motherhood, though it doesn't do more than touch briefly on women who are childless through choice and who don't define femininity as necessarily maternal.