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 D vila’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.

Berta Dávila (Santiago de Compostela) is a writer and poet. With O Derradeiro Libro de Emma Olsen (Editorial Galaxia, 2013) she won the prize of the Galician Publishers’ Association for the best book of fiction. For Carrusel (Editorial Barrett, 2019) she received the Manuel García Barros Novel Prize and the Premio de la Crítica española de narrativa en lengua gallega, which she also won in the poetry category for her collection Raíz da Fenda (Edicións Xerais, 2013). Her novel Illa Decepción (Editorial Galaxia, 2020) won the Repsol Short Story Prize.

Jacob Rogers is a translator of Galician and Spanish literature. He has been awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts and the PEN/Heim Translation fund. He has also co-edited features of Galician literature for Words Without Borders, Asymptote, and The Riveter. His translation of Manuel Rivas’ The Last Days of Terranova was published by Archipelago Books in 2022.