The Days of Abandonment

I’m recommending this book because it brilliantly captures the overwhelm and mania of a woman whose husband of fifteen years has left her for a younger woman. This novel likewise brilliantly captures the overwhelm and mania of being responsible for children and living within the flimsy identity of being a wife and mother. 

What I like best about this book is its darkness and strangeness. Raising children is full of paranoia, fear, and threats of danger at every turn, and a mother’s state of mind trickles down to all aspects of childrearing. It is refreshing to read such well-rendered (even… show more.

This was a harrowing read and rather claustrophobic because the writing is so intimate. I felt like I was part of Olga as she experienced many crises after her husband's unexpected departure. It was impossible not to feel her anguish, rage, loss of identity, loss of self, and every other shade of uncomfortable emotions.

She’s left alone with her two young children while her ex-husband cavorts with an uncomfortably young new lover. This book sucked me in right inside Olga. Her actions and thoughts took me on a journey that was unexpected yet strangely predictable in many ways. Wonderful writing… show more.

I’d recommend any one of the novels by Elena Ferrante, a writer who depicts with nuance and complexity her female characters’ psychology, as it’s impacted by the forces of society, family, motherhood, wifedom, work, economics, and politics. The Days of Abandonment is one of her earlier novels about a woman whose husband leaves her for a younger woman after 15 years of marriage. A common story, unfortunately, but what isn’t common is the brutally honest depiction of rage, sorrow, depression, loss of self, and the slow evolution of a new life and a new self. 

I read this novel feverishly, over a decade ago. Ferrante’s calm, snaking sentences yanked me into this book with a compulsive gravity. After her husband leaves her, the narrator, Olga, struggles to care for her two children. She forgets herself in her daily rounds — driving absently, denting fenders, braking at the last minute — “angrily, as if reality were inappropriate.”

Throughout this novel, Ferrante presents a devastating (yet somehow gratifying) portrait of feminine rage. When I first read this novel, still in my twenties, still generally polite and obliging, I recognized something frightening: the scorn of a woman who’s… show more.