Firstborn

A Memoir

De: Lauren Christensen

Narrado por: Lauren Christensen

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.

©2025 Lauren Christensen (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“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

“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