ABANDONERS EB

Begoña Gómez Urzaiz, Lizzie Davis

• Publisher: The Borough Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9780008656096
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

'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

Journalist Begoña Gómez Urzaiz is fascinated by women who left their children behind to pursue their artistic lives. Women like Ingrid Bergman, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing and Joni Mitchell.

This book captures those extraordinary stories, along with the realities of women who have no choice but to separate from their families, and the everyday guilt of mothers who dream quietly of freedom.

This is a book about motherhood, selfhood, ambition and creativity. Above all, it captures what our judgement of those women who 'abandon' 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

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• What Kind of Mother Abandons Her Child?
• Muriel Spark: A (Male) Writer’s Life
• Good Bad Mothers and Bad Bad Mothers
• Gala Dalí and the Matter of the Magnetic Woman™
• An Ogre, a Princess, an Ass: Mothers Who Leave in Meryl Streep’s Career
• Artisanal Motherhood
• Ingrid Bergman: A Daily Sadness
• Doris Lessing’s Third Son
• Momfluencers and the Economy of Turbomotherhood
• Nora Helmer and Anna Karenina: Stray Creatures
• What If?: The Braided Songs of Joni Mitchell and Vashti Bunyan
• It’s the Mother’s Fault
• Maria Montessori: The Child and the Method
• Mercè Rodoreda: Forest Bird
• If You Have Children, Mija
• The Underground Conversation
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• About the Publisher