Can you honestly say, if you are a mother, that you’ve never even thought about it? That you’ve never so much as let yourself imagine for a second how it would feel to just walk out of the door and leave all the chaos behind, on one of those long, scratchy afternoons when it seems as if bedtime will never come? If you haven’t, then perhaps this book isn’t for you. But I suspect there are many, many other mothers – the ones who have indeed let that guilty fantasy cross their minds, while knowing full well they’re never going to actually do it – who are going to inhale The Abandoners. I know I did.
Written partly during lockdown, a time that pushed many mothers trapped at home close to breaking point, Begoña Gómez Urzaiz’s tale “of mothers and monsters” is, on the face of it, about women who break the ultimate taboo and desert their children. Some are jaw-dropping stories in themselves: take the novelist Muriel Spark, who left her four-year-old in the care of nuns in Rhodesia during the second world war, after separating from his father, and moved back to Britain; or the YouTube influencer who very publicly adopted a Chinese child and then furtively “rehomed” him when it didn’t work out as planned. But it is the author’s interweaving of these stories with more everyday reflections on maternal guilt and judgment that turns this book into a fascinating portrait not just of those who leave, but those who stay.
