I remember that in the first months of my son Gaspar’s life, I often joked about how surprised I was that the bins weren’t full of abandoned babies. From my own exasperation and position of privilege, I thought of the many women who become mothers in much more adverse conditions—those who are more unstable, more alone, those who have no financial resources—and I imagined them full of dark thoughts.
At that time, Katixa Agirre’s book on “evil mothers,” as she herself described it in her dedication, fell into my hands, and it made me feel greatly comforted. These mothers, who did not fit the standard model, did not seem evil to me at all, but human and recognisable. Even those who were capable of the most terrible acts—infanticide—did not provoke my rejection, but rather, my compassion. This would have been difficult a long time ago, when I had not yet encountered the stories of dissonant motherhood that had long been buried under taboo.
Maria, the protagonist of our story, is one of these “wicked mothers”—struggling to bond with her baby, overwhelmed by emotions and thoughts previously unknown to her. Lacerating guilt accompanies and complicates a situation that society responds to almost exclusively with incomprehension and implacable judgment, dragging the mother into dangerous isolation with potentially disastrous consequences. That is why I felt this story could only be told in the form of a psychological thriller: a looming threat over a mother tormented by the certainty of her own monstrous condition.