Firstborn: A Memoir

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—a story about the intimate closeness of our most searing losses and our brightest hopes

“Some days I still think this is all just a sad story I’ll tell Simone one day.”

Lauren Christensen is a 30-something editor in New York City when she meets her 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 Lauren and Gabe joyfully discover she is pregnant with their daughter, Simone.

As she faces the prospect of becoming a mother herself, Lauren learns to let go of the fear of abandonment and need for control that growing up with a largely absent father and a high-powered mother who was always away on business instilled in her. She 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 Simone is dying in the womb.

In fierce, intimate, spellbinding prose, Lauren Christensen brings us to the very heart of the human 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. View Less