What would it be like if you didn’t have to put your children to bed? Would you feel ‘a brief flutter of excitement’ upon the realisation that you were free to do what you wanted for the first time, that you could eat whatever you fancied for dinner? Such are the questions that the Spanish journalist Begoña Gómez Urzaiz asks in The Abandoners, a study of women – or monsters – who have abandoned their children. Part literary history, taking in erudite abandoners such as Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing, part journalistic examination of ‘turbomotherhood’ and part memoir of a hard-working mother stuck at home with her children during the pandemic, The Abandoners brings together a variety of voices to pose the question: is it ever okay to abandon your children? The answer is not straightforward. 

Urzaiz combs through several cases of modern abandonment in her search for answers. Take the case of Myka Stauffer, the ‘momfluencer’ who, during the pandemic, created a profitable business filming her children for YouTube before adopting Huxley, a disabled child from China. Once it had become apparent that parenting Huxley – who has level-three autism and attention deficit disorder – would pose more of a challenge than they had thought, the Stauffers, in a video posted on their YouTube channel, confessed that they had ‘rehomed’ the child. Noting that the Dreft detergent brand sponsored the Stauffers’ posts, Urzaiz observes that children like Huxley are ‘the new labourers of the digital economy’. On social media, the abandonment of children typically provokes a modern kind of digital rage. But Urzaiz is quick to remind us that such rage is almost always directed towards women, ‘the sole bearers of responsibility’, and not towards men. 

Stories of abandonment are hard to find and even harder to fathom, says Urzaiz. She admits from the beginning that she cannot ‘understand a feminism that doesn’t encompass the maternal’. From this position, she examines why writers such as Spark and Lessing abandoned their children. It is the dilemma