Mothers Don't

(Paperback)

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A writer about to give birth investigates the story behind a mother she knows who has just killed her own twins.

A mother kills her twins. Another woman, the narrator of this story, is about to give birth. She is a writer, and she realises that she knows the woman who committed the infanticide. An obsession is born. She takes an extended leave, not for child-rearing, but to write. To research and write about the hidden truth behind the crime.

Mothers dont write. Mothers give life. How could a woman be capable of neglecting her children How could she kill them Is motherhood a prison Complete with elements of a traditional thriller, this a groundbreaking novel in which the chronicle and the essay converge. Katixa Agirre reflects on the relationship between motherhood and creativity, in dialogue with writers such as Sylvia Plath and Doris Lessing. Mothers Dont plumbs the depths of childhood and the lack of protection children face before the law. The result is a disturbing, original novel in which the author does not offer answers, but plants contradictions and discoveries.

Reviews

"It might seem that everything has already been said about the experience of motherhood and its darkest reverse sides, but Mothers don't shows that there are still many corners to explore, and it does it with accuracy and intelligence"--Aixa de la Cruz

"If Los turista desganados [Agirre's earlier nove], in narrative terms, is an 'odyssey, ' a transforming displacement, Mothers Don't is an Iliad, a private conflict that becomes public, a challenge in a reduced space, almost a closed-room novel, in which what we have to find out is not who the killer is, not even the motive, but how it is even possible that it happened"--Juan Marqus

Author Bio

Katixa Agirre (Vitoria, 1981) has a PhD in Audiovisual Communication and lectures at Universidad del Pas Vasco. She previously published the short story collections Sua falta zaigu and Habitat, and is the author of numerous children's books: Paularen seigarren atzamarra, Ez naiz sirena bat, eta zer, and Patzikuren problemak. She was also a columnist for Diario de Noticias de lava, Deia, Aizu! and Argia.

Katie Whittemore is graduate of the University of NH (BA), Cambridge University (M.Phil), and Middlebury College (MA), and was a 2018 Bread Loaf Translators Conference participant. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Two Lines, The Arkansas International, The Common Online, Gulf Coast Magazine Online, The Los Angeles Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and InTranslation. Current projects include novels by Spanish authors Sara Mesa, Javier Serena, Aliocha Coll, Aroa Moreno Durn, Nuria Labari, Katixa Agirre, and Juan Gmez Brcena.