The Narrator Decides to Investigate and Write About Alice's Case

The Narrator’s decision to investigate and write about Alice Espanet’s case turns a private obsession into a sustained literary and ethical undertaking. The project begins while she is physically depleted, becomes possible through an award that allows her to take leave from work, and gathers urgency when she learns that Alice Espanet’s trial is approaching. Its central difficulty is not simply how to tell the case, but what authority a writer can claim when the facts concern a mother accused of killing her children and some parts of the story may remain unknowable.

Obsession and the need to write

The project first takes shape against the Narrator’s physical exhaustion. She feels pained and broken down, unable to make literary use of that physical suffering; meanwhile, the case she thinks of as Jade/Alice occupies her day and night. Rather than treat the fixation as something to resist, she recognizes that she must immerse herself in it. Writing is the one clear imperative she knows, and her depleted state makes surrendering to the obsession easier. The decision begins, then, not with a settled plan but with an attentiveness that has already taken hold.

A later call from Gobierno Vasco brings another kind of recognition: the Narrator feels that she is no longer herself. After the initial shock, she decides that she must try to reassemble her sense of self, gathering fragments wherever they can be found. She understands writing as the route available to her for that work. The investigation is therefore at once directed toward another person’s case and bound up with her own attempt to recover a coherent identity; the text links the project to that need without claiming that the case itself can repair her.

Making room for the investigation

The Narrator waits a couple of days before telling Niclas about her decision, wanting him to understand it as more than a childish impulse. They celebrate the award, and she drinks some cava, with the guilt of a nursing mother accompanying the small indulgence. The prize brings in 18,000 euros before tax: meaningful money, though not enough by itself to transform their lives. At bath time, a moment she usually shares with Niclas and Erik, she explains that she intends to use the money to take leave beginning in February.

Niclas initially misunderstands who will take the leave. The Narrator clarifies that she will, that Erik will start daycare in February, and that her purpose is to write. This practical arrangement gives the project protected time, but the exchange also makes the decision legible as a change in her priorities: the award is not merely a financial benefit to celebrate but the means to claim time for work. Her choice to tell Niclas during an ordinarily relaxed family routine places the new ambition inside the rhythms of care rather than outside them.

During the two-week daycare adjustment period, she lays the groundwork for the investigation. She makes lists, identifies primary sources, considers how to frame the story, and decides which places she needs to visit. At the same time, she asks how much interpretive authority she can rightfully assume. These preparations show that the project is not only a subject she feels compelled to pursue; it is a piece of research whose sources, locations, and narrative stance must be deliberately chosen.

The writer’s ethical choices

The Narrator cannot settle whether she should write as though she were for the defense or closer to the prosecution. Nor can she decide whether a writer’s task is to judge, or whether judgment belongs to readers. Those questions make the investigation a contest over narrative authority as well as a reconstruction of events: each possible stance would shape what the case means and how responsibility is understood.

She also weighs fiction against a journalistic account limited to established facts. Journalism might leave in darkness what cannot be known and can only be intuited; fiction might cross that boundary, but she wonders whether it is legitimate to do so. If she rejects journalism, she still has to confront what it would mean to give literary form to violence against children. That question leaves her trembling, so she postpones it rather than pretending it has an easy answer. The hesitation marks a limit she can recognize even before she finds a way to write beyond it.

The legal framing sharpens the difficulty. In an early filing, the defense announces that it will seek acquittal on the basis of the insanity defense, invoking Article 20.1 of the Spanish Criminal Code. At trial, a question put to a doctor tests the basis for diagnosing Alice Espanet with postpartum psychosis, asking whether the diagnosis rests on her behavior and her own account. These legal and medical claims do not resolve the writer’s questions; they show how the case is already being narrated through competing accounts of mental state and criminal responsibility.

The trial brings the project back into focus

On the last day of August, at the end of the family’s vacation, the Narrator comes across a newspaper report while sitting with Niclas and Erik on a terrace. The report says that Alice Espanet’s trial is imminent: jury selection is scheduled for mid-September. Fourteen months have passed since the events, and the proceedings are ready to begin. The news overturns the Narrator’s expectation that she would have another six months or even a year before the case moved forward.

She responds with a renewed certainty that she must be in the courtroom, still and attentive, following every word and gesture. She wants to see Alice Espanet’s face, hear her voice, and study her gaze. The trial appears to offer the evidence and encounters the unfinished book needs. The sudden timing also catches her as her ambitions are wavering, and the prospect of being present restores the obsessive concentration she had experienced about a year earlier. The project’s course thus turns on a reversal: a development she had hoped would be delayed becomes the occasion for recommitment.

The eventual legal outcome gives the investigation a concrete endpoint without supplying a complete answer to the writer’s earlier questions. The jury finds Alice Espanet guilty while accepting the defense of insanity, and the judge substitutes outpatient psychiatric treatment for imprisonment; Alice Espanet is not admitted to a psychiatric institution. That disposition makes the case’s tension between guilt and impaired responsibility consequential, while leaving intact the distinction between a court’s decision and the fuller understanding the Narrator hoped to gain by witnessing the trial.

Significance of the decision

The decision to write is presented as both a return to work and an uncertain act of witnessing. The Narrator’s lists, source-gathering, planned visits, and wish to attend the trial give the undertaking a reporter’s discipline, while her consideration of fiction exposes the limits of any account that claims to know more than its evidence permits. Her questions about judgment, readers, and unknowable experience remain active rather than being tidily resolved.

The broader history of infanticide discussed alongside the case underscores why the legal categories matter. In Spain, infanticide was treated as a distinct offense from homicide from 1822 until 1995, and an earlier provision tied the offense to a mother’s attempt to conceal dishonor. This history places the case within a longer pattern in which the law has treated a mother’s act differently from homicide in general. The Narrator’s initial uncertainty about whether to write for the defense, the prosecution, or neither therefore carries more than stylistic weight: the story’s form bears on how maternal responsibility, mental illness, and judgment can be represented.

The work begins in an obsession she accepts, becomes materially possible through time taken from employment, and is redirected by the trial’s unexpectedly near arrival. Its decisive achievement at this stage is not a claim to have solved Alice Espanet’s story, but the Narrator’s commitment to pursue it while remaining alert to the difference between evidence, interpretation, and what no account can establish.