Firstborn
A Memoir
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- $199.00
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- $199.00
Descripción editorial
“An achingly beautiful testament to fierce loss, fierce love and fierce resilience.” —People Magazine
“You will find yourself rationing out pages to spend more time in the glow of Christensen’s luminous prose and inextinguishable love. A triumph.” —Oprah Daily (best new books to read this spring)
A lapidary memoir of losing a child before she can be born, which the author began writing the day she came home from the hospital—an intimate story about our most searing losses and brightest hopes
“Some days I still think this is all just a sad story I’ll tell Simone one day.”
Lauren Christensen is a thirtysomething editor in New York City when she meets her future husband, Gabe, a writer with whom she falls in love right away. Her beloved grandfather is dying, but the young couple is bringing new life into the family: Lauren and Gabe joyfully discover she is pregnant with their daughter, Simone.
As Lauren faces the prospect of becoming a parent, she learns to let go of the fear of abandonment and need for control instilled in her by growing up with a largely absent father and a high-powered mother who was often away on business. Lauren and Gabe are incandescently happy in their exuberant, messy, beautiful shared world. But just weeks after their wedding, they learn that their worst nightmare has come true: Simone is dying in the womb.
In fierce, tender, spellbinding prose, Firstborn brings us to the very heart of the human paradox: How do we live when everyone who makes up our world will someday be gone? And how can we mourn when the cosmic order has been turned upside down—when a child dies before she is born?
As she comes up against the brutal limits of maternal healthcare and the limitlessness of her love for her daughter, Lauren Christensen finds a key, generous and brave, in which to share her loss, a testimony whose diamond-like brilliance refracts a universal light.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New York Times book editor Christensen debuts with a devastating account of her decision to terminate a dangerous pregnancy. When Christensen became pregnant in the early 2020s, she was surprised, as her disordered eating had sabotaged her periods throughout much of her 20s and early 30s. But she and her husband, Gabriel, were thrilled by the prospect of becoming parents and tentatively named their unborn daughter Simone. During Christensen's second trimester, however, the couple learned that Simone had a chromosomal abnormality that would kill her—and possibly Christensen—if she was carried to term. The decision, according to Christensen's doctors, was between aborting at 22 weeks or facing a significant risk of preeclampsia. Christensen intertwines her account of the turbulent decision process with an unpacking of her difficult relationship with her own mother, whose frequent business trips left Christensen feeling abandoned as a child. The tragedy helped repair their bond, however ("My need for my mother felt as mighty as my need for motherhood," Christensen writes). With admirable candor, Christensen mines the complexities of life, grief, and family through the prism of her own devastation. It's a stunning achievement.
