Firstborn A memoir

"Stories like this one are for the rest of us, the ones left behind," writes New York Times Book Review critic Christensen in the first pages of her first book, a memoir of the traumatic ending of her first pregnancy and the death, at 21 weeks in utero, of Simone, who was already much loved, her birth anxiously anticipated. With laser focus and exacting details, Christensen recalls the chapter of her life into which Simone entered, the author and her partner's bright new life together. In a delicately interwoven style, she also places readers in the room as she "learned my unborn daughter would die. That in fact she had been both growing and dying inside of me for weeks, if not months." Firstborn movingly limns grief in its bewilderment and universality. In the immediate aftermath of the news, Christensen envies her own worrying mother, "who had a daughter who could still live." It's also an important record of a loss longing to be told. Transforming Simone's experience into words, Christensen has created art that will undoubtedly offer comfort to others.

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. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (Mar.)

A grieving mother attempts to define, understand, and honor her role. At 20 weeks pregnant, Christensen learned that Simone, the baby growing within her, was surrounded by and filled with fluid. At 22 weeks, Simone was delivered stillborn and breeched. Christensen's memoir chronicles the path to this cavernous loss and offers an elegy for the externally recognizable, embodied version of motherhood that was lost along with her daughter. "Simone changed the calculus in every way," the author writes, as she moves from her gradual, almost unconscious decision to even have a child to her excitement, anticipation, and surrender to her daughter's anchoring urgency in Christensen's life and relationship. The author's history of panic attacks and disordered eating saturates her experience of the fundamental bodiliness of pregnancy, her appraisal of her pregnancy's actual and potential turning points, and the lack of control she has over its outcome. Christensen's attachment to her own mother further situates both her pregnancy and Simone within the company and camaraderie of generations of daughters and granddaughters. Some of Christensen's most eloquent passages are embedded in observations and memories of her mother and the "imperfect symmetry of our motherhoods." The author appears unready or unwilling--understandably--to wrestle publicly with the full essence and manifestation of her grief and her love; each time she comes close to this more probing exposition, she seems to recoil, offering instead the minutiae of meals and one-off interactions. In a text permeated with foreboding reminders of the end we know is to come, such details can be tedious and disorienting, but they serve to wrestle order and arc into a "tragedy without a bottom," thwarting others' generalized and painfully inadequate efforts to console and comfort. A frank account of the fine, eerie thread between death and life. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.