Motherhood, Crime, and Investigation in Katixa Agirre's Las madres no

Abstract

Infanticide is one of the most terrifying and socially condemned crimes. It disturbs us in such a way as to unsettle the foundations which sustain our culture, and the inquiry it motivates enters into one of the greatest taboos of our species. Katixa Agirre scrutinizes such a mystery with her first novel, Las madre no (2018), in which she seeks to understand what leads a mother to kill her twins. The narrator, first time mother, simultaneously develops a search for the truth of the murder and of literary writing, seeking to understand what it means to be a mother and to be a writer, and what political and social repercussions it has in 21^st-Century Spain. This article emphasizes how the use of strategies that belong to the genre of crime fiction allows to investigate the contradictions and the darkest parts of maternal experience, such as affective ambivalence and a doorway to madness.