The Abandoners

‘The best kind of book: the one you didn’t know you were craving until it appeared … self-interrogative, intricately perceptive. I absolutely inhaled it’ JIA TOLENTINO ‘A very richly interesting exploration of a complex subject. Begoña Gómez Urzaiz tells the stories with such intelligence and wit and generosity’ TESSA HADLEY ‘Fascinating … I suspect there are many, many other mothers who are going to inhale The Abandoners’OBSERVER When it comes to children: a man leaves, a woman abandons Ingrid Bergman, Muriel Spark, Maria Montessori, Joni Mitchell … what did they give up to become the women they were to the world? 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 were able to overcome both society’s judgement and their own maternal instincts in order to leave their children.

More than anything, she was fascinated by her own prejudice towards these women, so clearly tied up in a much wider cultural bias. Using famous examples including Doris Lessing, fictional ones such as Anna Karenina, and interrogating modern trends like Momfluencers, Begoña reveals what our judgement of these women tells us about our judgement of all women. ‘The best book I've read on the implications of motherhood and its opposites after Sheila Heti's Motherhood’ CLAUDIA DURASTANTI