Euripides’ enormous Medea names a symptom. Unfortunately, today a dreadful harvest of flesh and blood imitators is harvested: mothers are like fathers who can kill their children just to punish their ex-partners.
Emmanuel Carrère was inspired by a real case for The Adversary about a man who cheated on his family for years and then killed everyone, including his children, so that his true identity would not be revealed. An earlier short novel by Carrère already introduces the theme of the father’s monstrosity: A Week in the Snow. From a real source, Herman Koch’s amazing Dinner reflects how parents’ dubious attitudes put their children in danger.
Two novels that follow this line have emerged more recently: Las madres no, in which Katixa Aguirre kills her twins for no apparent reason, and Emily Ruskovich’s Idaho, where a mother kills her youngest daughter. and loses the biggest one.
There are other ways to kill children without killing them, and some contemporary thrillers illustrate this in an extraordinary way. We have to talk about Kevin, by Lionel Shriver, who perhaps gets all the credit for his ability to delve into the psychological twists of a mother’s guilt for not loving a child and the consequences of that.
A mother’s guilt for not being able to love is addressed in Tatiana Tibuleac’s Summer, one of the most poetic contemporary novels, My Mother Had Green Eyes. As a mother or father, insecurity causes you to lose ground against an unknown person, a very sick kangaroo, who enters the house to raise children, as in Leila Slimani’s fast-paced song Sweet.
Written in 1871 by a man named Henrik Ibsen, House of Dolls already marks the path to female independence when a woman so close to her family decides to leave her marriage and children to live alone for a while and mature. Sometimes we forget that it is the precursor of hundreds of books on women’s desire to question their motherhood or to give up motherhood.