Killing your darlings is well-worn advice given to writers labouring over something that just isn’t working and would be better excised from their work. However, in Katixa Agirre’s Mothers Don’t, (2018, tr: Kristin Addis, 2022) it’s the the literal pivot on which this novel rests, creativity on one side, while on the other sits the extreme end of postpartum depression: infanticide. 

The last book I read tackling this subject was Véronique Olmi’s Beside the Sea (2001, tr. Adriana Hunter, 2010: Peirene Press), which internalised a woman’s mental illness as she prepared for the act. Here, the sadness is in the inscrutability of such a decision and one that, as it is explored, is littered throughout with the ‘bad’ mothers of history and culture.

The unnamed narrator, who shares a close biography with Agirre, is a new mother who becomes preoccupied with a recent media sensation wherein a woman drowned her young twins. There’s a personal connection too as she knew the killer back in her student days. What then, the narrator asks, possesses a woman to do that?

In posing the question, an answer must be found. And the way to get to the heart of the matter is to base her next novel upon the case. What follows, as the media furore dissolves into the subsequent trial, is an exploration on matters of femininity and creation, reflecting on a woman’s ability to produce a child (a life needing nurture) and that of the book that, once delivered, has a life of its own that the writer can move on from. But its eye roams wider, bringing in societal ills like misogyny, capitalism, and mental health.

For all its discursive tangents and introspection on her motherhood and relationship with her partner, it comes with much discussion on women’s bodies, and the physical and psychological effects of children with a frankness reminiscent of Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat. It’s somehow a thrilling ride, its prose engaging throughout as the story spins toward the trial and the narrator, child in tow, finds epiphanies if not outright answers in the courtroom of opinion.