
Firstborn
A Memoir
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Narrated by:
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Lauren Christensen
About this listen
“An achingly beautiful testament to fierce loss, fierce love and fierce resilience.”—People Magazine
“You will find yourself rationing out pages to spend more time in the glow of Christensen’s luminous prose and inextinguishable love. A triumph.”—Oprah Daily (best new books to read this spring)
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 AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“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 . . . Told with dry, offhand charm . . . 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.”—Amy Bloom, The New York Times Book Review
“Masterfully constructed . . . Powerful and beautifully written, Firstborn tells the archetypal story of a journey to the underworld, from which the storyteller emerges to deliver wisdom both profound and painful. How does one go on living after such a calamity? Christensen’s sparkling telling is the ultimate proof of survival: an artful, authentic story forged from the messiness of real life. . . . Told in the fierce, clear voice of someone who has been through death . . . full of love . . . exquisitely sensitive . . . Firstborn is a treasure for readers, as we navigate difficult passages of our own, whatever their nature.”—Kathryn Rhett, The Washington Post
“Some books win our allegiance almost instantly. Such was the case with Lauren Christensen’s radiant, rigorous, heart-rending debut memoir, Firstborn, which engaged me from the opening pages, profoundly moved me, and gave me thoughts too deep for tears . . . She depicts a world of pain and troubles, yet the memoir is suffused with such unwavering love, and characterized by such soulful intelligence and courageous candor, that it feels uplifting in a profoundly well-earned way . . . Like the great romantic poet [Wordsworth], Christensen has both recorded her own loss in its particularity and made it representative of all loss.”—Priscilla Gilman, The Boston Globe
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Story
When Joe Dunthorne began researching his family history, he expected to write the account of their harrowing escape from Nazi Germany in 1935. What he found in his great-grandfather Siegfried’s voluminous, unpublished, partially translated memoir was a much darker, more complicated story. Armed only with his great-grandfather’s rambling, nearly two-thousand-page deathbed memoir and a handful of archival clues, Dunthorne traveled to Munich, Ammendorf, Berlin, Ankara, and Oranienburg to uncover the sprawling, unsettling legacy of Siegfried’s work.
By: Joe Dunthorne
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Stop Me If You've Heard This One
- A Novel
- By: Kristen Arnett
- Narrated by: Cameron Esposito
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Cherry Hendricks might be down on her luck, but she can write the book on what makes something funny: she’s a professional clown who creates raucous, zany fun at gigs all over Orlando. Between her clowning and her shifts at an aquarium store for extra cash, she’s always hustling. Not to mention balancing her judgmental mother, her messy love life, and her equally messy community of fellow performers. Things start looking up when Cherry meets Margot the Magnificent—a much older lesbian magician—who seems to have worked out the lines between art, business, and life.
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From the first chapter , trashy sexual start to book was a total turn off
- By Kay Ortscheid on 04-09-25
By: Kristen Arnett
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Four Red Sweaters
- Powerful True Stories of Women and the Holocaust
- By: Lucy Adlington
- Narrated by: Esther Wane
- Length: 9 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Jock Heidenstein, Anita Lasker, Chana Zumerkorn, and Regina Feldman all faced the Holocaust in different ways. While they did not know each other—in fact had never met—each had a red sweater that would play a major part in their lives. In this absorbing and deeply moving account, award-winning clothes historian Lucy Adlington documents their stories, knitting together the experiences that fragmented their families and their lives. Adlington immortalizes these young women whose resilience, skills, strength, and kindness accompanied them through the darkest events in human history.
By: Lucy Adlington
What listeners say about Firstborn
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Ashley M.
- 03-28-25
Beautiful
This is such a heartbreaking story but told so beautifully. I lost my daughter at 16 weeks to trisomy 18 so I felt all these things and sobbed as I relived my story through hers. It makes me know I am not alone in my journey and you aren’t either. ❤️
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- Athena Baschal
- 03-24-25
My Anna
Totally resonated with Lauren's experience as I too lost My Anna at 20 weeks pregnant. Though the circumstances were different, I experienced almost everything she did physically and emotionally. Hearing her voice the book took me right back to when my firstborn Anna was "miscarried" in 1985. Thank you, Lauren, for sharing your story. Brava!
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