Overview

“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.

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9780593831816

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Reviews

“Firstborn is the story of a loss so deep and acutely observed it left me winded. Like all stories of grief, it is a record of love, fierce and carefully tended. That love is profound; it suffuses every page of this beautiful, devastating book.” —Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies, One of The New York Times' 10 Best Books of 2021 “Firstborn is a tender and unflinching exploration of the complexities of grief and motherhood—and of the tragedy of living in bodies that are always more vulnerable than we think they are. Lauren Christensen offers a powerfully intimate perspective on navigating some of life's most difficult moments, one that will surely bring comfort and recognition to many readers.” —Meghan O’Rourke, New York Times bestselling author of The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness

Author Information

Lauren Christensen is an editor at The New York Times Book Review. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son.

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