Reviewing the movie Nightbitch, about a mother who is transformed into a wild dog by the demands of staying at home with her toddler, the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis notes that the film “doesn’t need to convince its target audience that there’s something gravely wrong with contemporary American motherhood, even for families that can afford to have a parent stay home with a child.” Indeed, Dargis (who has no children of her own, by the way) no-tes that “every thinking woman who watches Nightbitch, and a fair share of men, too, already know that score.”

This general acknowledgement among “thinking” people that modern motherhood can make you behave in unimaginable—perhaps barbaric—ways is also at the heart of the book The Abandoners, by Spanish journalist Begoña Gómez Urzaiz.

Urzaiz, who is the mother of two young kids, acknowledges that she has long been fascinated by stories of mothers who leave their children, mostly to pursue their professional ambitions. This book is her attempt not only to understand where that fascination comes from but also why she—an enlightened cosmopolitan woman—is so judgmental about these “abandoners.” “Why is it so hard for me,” she asks, “to accept someone that might want to separate from her children, for a while or forever, if I think of myself as such a devoted feminist, if I believe I have a proper understanding of human complexity and empathize with so many deviations from the norm?”

Her obsession with the topic leads to some fascinating and disturbing investigations. Take the story of the novelist Muriel Spark, for instance, who married a man 13 years her senior, someone she barely knew, and moved with him to what was then Rhodesia. A short time later, she gave birth to a son, Robin. Urzaiz quotes from Spark’s account of the day: “I was at the end of my strength and didn’t expect that either I or my baby would survive.… I had bitten down one of my nails. My husband brought me a manicure set and a bunch of flowers.” As Urzaiz notes, “Her only son is born. She breaks a nail.”

Less than two years later, she files for divorce from a husband who is increasingly violent and mentally ill. When Robin is four, she leaves him at a convent and departs for England. A couple of years later, Robin joins her and then is raised by Spark’s parents, seeing his mother only on holidays. She doe-n’t do much besides provide financial support. As one of Spark’s lovers noted, Spark’s mother has “quite naturally, taken Muriel’s place as a mother to Robin, who looks upon Muriel as someone who visits him occasionally and gives him presents…. There seems little maternal feeling in Muriel—but she may have been suppressing.”

If the latter, there is little indication in her writings that Spark had any regrets about what she did. Urzaiz explores the counterfactual. Would a more maternal Spark have published 22 novels? “Could Spark have written with such lightness and concentration if she’d had to prepare two or three meals a day for a small child? Who knows, but it isn’t likely. She possessed a rare combination of talent, determination, diligence, and hunger for glory. She was able to quickly seize the writer’s ego one needs to get ahead in the publishing world. But even the writer-mother with the best-equipped ego has to stop from time to time to gather Legos from the floor.”

In 1949, Ingrid Bergman wrote a now-famous letter to Roberto Rossellini—a letter that began their romance. She went to Italy to star in his film Stromboli. She asked her husband Petter Lindström for a divorce, but he refused, and even forbade her to return to the United States. For two years, as Urzaiz notes, Bergman didn’t see her 10-year-old daughter Pia, and then only sporadically after that. Bergman was unhappy before the affair, stifled apparently by life with her husband and daughter: “The actress kept journals all her life, in part because she was convinced from a very young age that she would do something that mattered, that all the world would know her name.” Her daughter, though she eventually and publicly forgave her mother’s decision, describes herself as “part of what was left” after her mother’s departure. Bergman also largely abandoned other children by Rossellini to the care of nannies in Rome while she left for Paris.

Pia’s forgiveness is an exception. Most of the children described in The Abandoners either have no relationship with their mother or relationships that are terribly dysfunctional. Sometimes the mothers have children after the ones they abandon, and they become unnaturally attached to those well into adulthood. From Doris Lessing—who, like Spark, abandoned two of her children in Africa while she moved back to England—to the child psychologist Maria Montessori, who gave up hers to pursue her scientific-research career, these women all led lives far from what was expected of them at the time. Urzaiz combs through their memoirs and diaries and the accounts from their children and friends to understand what motivated their decisions and how they felt after the fact about what they had done.

Montessori, who got pregnant before she was married and whose mother offered to send the child to a faraway convent so that she could continue her work, was racked with guilt for much of her life and actually wrote a letter to the boy when he was 15 and kidnapped him back. The horror of spending your days researching and developing methods for teaching children while never getting to watch your own child develop seems beyond belief.

_____________

But while Urzaiz goes to great lengths to assure readers that she loves her own children, she is also consumed by the idea of what women like her could accomplish were they not weighed down by these small creatures. Also woven throughout the book are fictional accounts of maternal abandonment. She describes, for instance, Tolstoy’s portrayal of Anna Karenina’s decision to live apart from her son to be with her lover. Urzaiz wonders whether Tolstoy’s views of women who choose another life was informed by reading his wife’s diary. After bearing four children, Sofia Tolstoy wrote: “I was wondering today why there were no women writers, artists, or composers of genius. It’s because all the passion and abilities of an energetic woman are consumed by her family, love, her husband—and especially her children.”

Of course, this is no longer the case. As Urzaiz explains: “Almost the entire scaffolding that supports both A Doll’s House and Anna Karenina and makes their plots believable has now been dismantled. Anyone can divorce if they can afford it. Shared custody exits. Women are not, in name, the property of their husbands or fathers. It’s not even necessary to pair off, nor reproduce the heterosexual model to have children.”

Urzaiz keeps wondering: Why don’t men have this problem? Why can they divorce their wives or leave their lovers without being judged harshly for skipping out on their children? She is asking two separate, though not unrelated, questions. Why can men (though hardly most men) be separated from their children without being devastated? And why don’t we judge men who do this in the same way that we judge women?

She has spent years reading online essays and confessionals, talking to other mothers around her—and she just can’t figure out why. After all, like so many of the women she profiles, Urzaiz has also found herself bored or annoyed with her own children, perhaps especially at their ability to interfere with her getting work done. She recounts going on work trips where she is simultaneously saddened to be away from them even for a night and feeling guilty for enjoying her time alone. So how can she be so critical—how can we all be so critical—of women who act on that impulse more permanently?

The closest she comes to making peace with her “Puritan” instinct to condemn these women is when she reads the words of Doris Lessing’s daughter, Jenny Diski: “I am a feminist and a mother. I applaud the escape to freedom of a woman living her own life at such a time and in such a place, and her determination to fulfil her passion, to experience the power of her need to write. I get the need to flee, but no matter how I try to put myself in her place, I am perplexed by her emotional ability actually to do it.”

Indeed, maybe it is not merely society’s patriarchal structures that keep women from abandoning their children. Maybe it’s something closer to a biological impulse that binds these mothers and their offspring in ways just too primal to be overridden by even the most freeing modern culture. But this persistent belief—the belief that it is impossible for women to write great novels or act in great movies and also care for families—has become a kind of brain worm for the sisterhood. Female journalists regularly write about how the expectations of motherhood are all but impossible to fulfill. At least if they can’t get “a room of one’s own,” maybe they can get some government-funded health care and some mandatory paternity leave. But in truth, the world is not filled with frustrated Muriel Sparks, who wrote enduring works that illuminate the human condition. Indeed, the parade of self-referential novels and memoirs and political screeds emanating from 40-something women these days provides readers little sense that these tomes would be worth leaving any children over. But readers may take wisdom from the complaints these works represent—and that Urzaiz makes a game but entirely unsatisfying effort to disentangle—and simply decide to forego having children at all.

We want to hear your thoughts about this article. Click here to send a letter to the editor.