FIRSTBORN

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.