“No other change in life demands so much in return,” writes the unnamed narrator in Berta Dávila’s The Dear Ones (2022, tr: Jacob Rogers, 2023). The change in question is having a child and from the outset it’s clear that she has chosen to have an abortion. There’s scant consideration of any morality at play – the choice is made – as this work of autofiction is less about the act and more a survey of the decision. And it’s one derived from past experience.

The impulse to write about this topic comes from a failed attempt to write a novel about the bonds between a mother and her son, where the son is lost in an accident. However, as the fiction feels off, the facts needing manipulated to make it right, it becomes a different story, a personal tale also about a mother and her own grief (“A new mother is a woman grieving for the woman she has left behind.”) brought on by her son.

Five years before, the narrator thought having a child “would bring me close to the platonic ideal of happiness” and, with her partner at the time, had attended fertility clinics and suffered miscarriages before eventual success. The child would be “someone who would fill me with happiness that could occupy all the empty spaces of my melancholy and boredom” but the reality (“he went from a child to a chore’) had gone unconsidered. 

Now, with the opportunity to be a mother again, it’s the practical issues (“fatigue, a new domestic routine, self-sacrifice, and surrendering my own time and pleasure”) that weigh heavily alongside questions of her own inadequacy or fitness to be a mother, while also engaging with harsher truths on apathy and the loose fit of the role when the bond between both is “neither magnetic or magical”.

In a straight-talking, clear and engaging style Dávila comes at her narrator’s experiences through many lenses, through family, friends, and the others she meets. It’s a book that understands people come and go in a life, whether that be through relationships naturally ending, the loss of mental faculty, or a friend who disappears leaving only rumours and while we don’t always get to say our farewells, it feels that in writing this book it’s a chance to explain a goodbye without the need for hello.

The Dear Ones is a report from the edges of postpartum depression, a survivor song that tells of the difficulties in having one’s life changed by a child. The emotional disconnect, the societal expectations, and how the supposed happiness gives way to an undercurrent of resentment. But its also a defense “against other peoples ideas”, especially as, like the mother and son (“we’re equal beings who don’t seek to impose our will on one another”), there is life to be had if those that matter are embraced and what doesn’t make us happy is rejected.