A NEW MOTHER IS A WOMAN GRIEVING FOR THE WOMAN SHE HAS LEFT BEHIND. A GRIEF THAT RECEIVES NO CONSOLATION. A PLACE WITHOUT ROOM FOR CONTROVERSY OR REGRET. Would you ever want to go back to that place?
THE DEAR ONES is a book about a woman who, five years after giving birth, decides to have an abortion. A mother full of guilt, who does not fit into the imposed canon. It is a book in which the protagonist defends the freedom of choice: to continue to be herself and to be a mother at the same time. The idea of guilt in motherhood, the obligation to feel a certain way, the loneliness implicit in all processes that involve taking in emotions that are considered wrong or atavistic, and an enormous isolation that is invisible to others, hover over the pages of the book.
Berta Dávila's prose is transparent, simple and precise. But its skeleton is made up of a temporal braid in which a writer recalls the birth and the first months of her son's life, just when, five years later, she has decided to have an abortion and not to have her second. She does this with a slimmed-down style and a direct structure, without any rhetorical flourishes. Everything is bones.
"Five years after becoming a mother, a woman chooses to have an abortion. This uneasy duality forms the premise of Galician author Berta Dávila's intimate, probing exploration of motherhood in her memoir."—Samantha Siefert,
Asymptote
review
"It takes nine months for a child to form in the womb and be born, but no one knows how long it takes for a mother to do the same," Dávila muses, never pretending to know or even seek a precise answer to the unstated question, instead dedicating this short but intense novel to articulating plainly the spaces between the themes of motherhood the ones discussed openly, and the ones that are not."—Samantha Siefert,
"This is what a good book is to me, the 'messages' it carries are not obvious statements dictated by the author, but surprising and personal revelations that might be different to each reader. It takes a great amount of talent to write from one place of experience and still welcome in readers from everywhere else. Being someone who sees books as relationships, I feel almost indebted to Berta Dávila for having put this book into the world for us to find, and for Jacob Rogers for having translated it. It is now one of my dear ones."—Isabela Torezan,
Glasgow Review of Books
"THE DEAR ONES is not a long book, at just 150 pages, and though I had recently been short of free time in which to read, I was able to finish it in three or four sessions. It is not a story with a gripping plot, the kind that makes people say "I couldn't stop reading, I couldn't close the book!" No, it could actually provoke the opposite reaction. It deals so sincerely with death, birth and suffering; I would understand if someone needed several weeks to finish it, and some more days to recover from it. But I painfully enjoyed the way Dávila connects the two ends of the string that is life."—Isabela Torezan,
Fiction.