The Dear Ones

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 Dvila'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.