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 — perhaps Simone a little more than her mother, through her mother’s book.
Christensen’s journey starts in her 30s with a series of unforeseeable events, all told with dry, offhand charm. These begin when Christensen surprises herself by loving a novel with a taxi-yellow cover that crosses her desk at The New York Times Book Review, where she works as an editor. Smitten, she finishes it in one sitting and, when she runs into a colleague, surprises herself further — while maybe a little bit high on “tiny edibles” — by praising the book to the skies yet struggling to recall its title. (In what is either a running gag or an act of assiduous restraint, she never names it in her memoir, but there are enough clues for a reader to identify it as Gabriel Bump’s 2020 novel “Everywhere You Don’t Belong.”) After the review runs, the author follows her on Twitter and she follows him back; one thing leads to another until finally — after much video chatting during Covid lockdowns — they fall madly, unstoppably in love and buy a house together.
Christensen’s narrative style underlines interesting particulars while sliding over much that we are left to guess at. What we don’t know, we may not need to know. (To paraphrase Henry James, there are some conversations we are not meant to overhear.) One of my favorite passages in the book concerns the way Christensen both did and did not want a child. Astutely, she notices every waver, every “maybe, but.” According to her, “A life with Gabe alone seemed to me as full as a life could possibly be.” According to her sensible therapist, to whom Christensen gives full credit, “if I was neither menopausal nor using any form of birth control, she said, then I was trying to become pregnant.” And so she does.
Yet in the kind of foreshadowing that life offers, the pregnancy is touched from the start by mortality. As Christensen undergoes routine ultrasounds and meets her midwife, her family is simultaneously grieving and supporting her beloved grandfather Gong Gong, who is suffering from Parkinson’s and memory failure at the end of his long life. Christensen asserts his right — and hers, and ours — to be something other than dignified, to be “miraculous and embarrassing, fundamentally ungovernable” in our bodies. “Despite our delusions,” she writes, “none of us ever had much control over our lives, or our deaths, at all.”
Gong Gong’s decline lets us meet the rest of Christensen’s family: her mother, who grieves by doing what must be done, her younger brother, her grandmother, her stepfather, her father and more extended family, who come to us not as full portraits but as supporting characters whose meaning and role remain clear even if their faces and personalities are not quite defined.
It is in the painful, detailed events of Simone’s death in her mother’s womb and the wrenching decision to terminate the pregnancy — along with the politics of that choice, and the urgency to ensure the mother survives even though the baby will not and cannot — that Christensen’s spare, sometimes glancing style serves so well. Every moment, every transition, from first doctor’s meeting to Simone’s last heartbeat to the final hugs from the mostly excellent and caring nurses, is given to us.
The title “Firstborn” is plainly a reference to Simone, but in this memoir of mothers and daughters it is equally a reference to Christensen herself. There is the thread throughout of Christensen’s reunion with her mother, a hard-working businesswoman whose frequent absences during Christensen’s childhood are mentioned many times, and forgiven many times, until there are no complaints and no need to forgive. 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.
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