Firstborn - by Lauren Christensen (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"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.

Review Quotes

"There are two fierce, fragile fighters in Firstborn, Lauren Christensen's touching memoir about the life and death of her tiny daughter, Simone, who was stillborn 22 weeks into Christensen's pregnancy. The great accomplishment of this book is that I feel I have gotten to know and care for both tenacious people . . . Told with dry, offhand charm . . . there is just love, and the care a mother gives her daughter, no matter what; and finally and always the love this mother, Lauren Christensen, gave her daughter, Simone, in this life and beyond." --Amy Bloom, The New York Times Book Review

"Then I picked up Lauren Christensen's Firstborn. My waking hours were at the mercy of the memoir, a moving account of the loss of her first child, Simone. I fought off sleep to keep reading and when I awoke, the book was the first thing I reached for." --Meg Zukin, Los Angeles Times

"Masterfully constructed . . . Powerful and beautifully written, Firstborn tells the archetypal story of a journey to the underworld, from which the storyteller emerges to deliver wisdom both profound and painful. How does one go on living after such a calamity? Christensen's sparkling telling is the ultimate proof of survival: an artful, authentic story forged from the messiness of real life. . . . Told in the fierce, clear voice of someone who has been through death . . . full of love . . . exquisitely sensitive . . . Firstborn is a treasure for readers, as we navigate difficult passages of our own, whatever their nature." --Kathryn Rhett, The Washington Post

"Some books win our allegiance almost instantly. Such was the case with Lauren Christensen's radiant, rigorous, heart-rending debut memoir, Firstborn, which engaged me from the opening pages, profoundly moved me, and gave me thoughts too deep for tears . . . She depicts a world of pain and troubles, yet the memoir is suffused with such unwavering love, and characterized by such soulful intelligence and courageous candor, that it feels uplifting in a profoundly well-earned way . . . Like the great romantic poet [Wordsworth], Christensen has both recorded her own loss in its particularity and made it representative of all loss." --Priscilla Gilman, The Boston Globe

"In laying the details and complexities of her experience bare, Christensen gives language to an experience for which others insist there are no words, humanity to a child that might otherwise be reduced to a tragedy, and community to those isolated in and by their own griefs. 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)

"Moving . . . As life-affirming as it is fraught, traversing subjects of searing loss and unimaginable grief with resolve." --People (book of the week)

"Teems with life and love." --Vanity Fair

"An achingly candid record of [an] unfathomable loss." --TIME

"Moving . . . As life-affirming as it is fraught, traversing subjects of searing loss and unimaginable grief with resolve." --AirMail

"With admirable candor, Christensen mines the complexities of life, grief, and family through the prism of her own devastation. It's a stunning achievement." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"In a delicately interwoven style . . . Firstborn movingly limns grief in its bewilderment and universality . . . An important record of a loss longing to be told . . . Christensen has created art that will undoubtedly offer comfort to others." --Booklist

"Grief is often nudged out of our day-to-day lives, but Christensen has given us the gift of slowing down to honor it. Her story is vital, unforgettable in its honesty and tenderness." --Chanel Miller, New York Times bestselling author of Know My Name

"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

About the Author

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