Firstborn Girls
A Memoir
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Narrated by:
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Robin Miles
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Bernice L. McFadden
About this listen
From award-winning author and creative writing professor at Tulane University comes an intimate and powerful memoir exploring inherited trauma, family secrets, and the enduring bonds of love between mothers and daughters.
On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died in a car crash near Detroit, only to be resuscitated after her mother pulled her from the flaming wreckage. Firstborn Girls traces her remarkable life from that moment up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar.
Growing up in 1980s Brooklyn, Bernice finds solace in books, summer trips to Barbados, and boarding school to escape her alcoholic father. Discovering the works of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, she finally sees herself and her loved ones reflected in their stories of “messy, beautiful, joyful Black people.”
Interwoven with Bernice's personal journey is her family's history, beginning with her four-times enslaved great-grandmother Louisa Vicey Wilson in 1822 Hancock County, Georgia. Her descendants survived Reconstruction and Jim Crow, joined the Great Migration, and mourned Dr. King’s assassination during the Civil Rights Movement. These women's wisdom, secrets, and fierce love are passed down like Louisa's handmade quilt.
A memoir of many threads, Firstborn Girls is an extraordinarily moving portrait of a life shaped by family, history, and the drive to be something more.
©2025 Bernice L. McFadden (P)2025 Penguin AudioRelated to this topic
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- By: Bernice L. McFadden
- Narrated by: Myra Lucretia Taylor
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Warmest December is the incredibly moving story of one Brooklyn family and the alcoholism that determined years of their lives. Narrated by Kenzie Lowe, a young woman reminiscent of Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John, as she visits her dying father and finds that choices she once thought beyond her control are very much hers to make.
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Bernice McFadden
- By Constance Knight on 07-01-20
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Ours
- A Novel
- By: Phillip B. Williams
- Narrated by: Joniece Abbott-Pratt
- Length: 22 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this ingenious, sweeping novel, Phillip B. Williams introduces us to an enigmatic woman named Saint, a fearsome conjurer who, in the 1830s, annihilates plantations all over Arkansas to rescue the people enslaved there. She brings those she has freed to a haven of her own creation: a town just north of St. Louis, magically concealed from outsiders, named Ours. It is in this miraculous place that Saint’s grand experiment—a truly secluded community where her people may flourish—takes root.
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Beautiful and poetic
- By tgc on 09-04-24
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Glorious
- By: Bernice L. McFadden
- Narrated by: Alfre Woodard
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Glorious is set against the backdrops of the Jim Crow South, the Harlem Renaissance, and the civil rights era. Blending the truth of American history with the fruits of Bernice L. McFadden's rich imagination, this is the story of Easter Venetta Bartlett, a fictional Harlem Renaissance writer whose tumultuous path to success, ruin, and revival offers a candid portrait of the American experience in all its beauty and cruelty.
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Gruesome violence
- By Marilyn on 11-22-11
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This Is Not a Game
- A Novel
- By: Kelly Mullen
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A unique locked-room debut with a memorable intergenerational relationship and gaming angle, about a grandmother and granddaughter who are snowed in at a lavish party at a mansion where the host has been murdered, and the unlikely sleuthing pair must draw on a unique skillset to navigate a dangerous game together.
By: Kelly Mullen
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Sugar Valley Series 1
- The Culmination of Everything
- By: Christina C. Jones
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden, Wesleigh Siobhan
- Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Losing everything doesn't have to be the end. Sometimes, it's a chance to find something different.
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Loyalisa30
- By Lisa Osborn on 03-06-20
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Tisoy
- By: Bernice McFadden
- Narrated by: Ron Domingo
- Length: 1 hr and 30 mins
- Original Recording
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When we meet Joseph Patrick, he’s in the midst of a classic midlife crisis. After dropping an obscene amount of money on a luxury watch — and leaving his wallet at the store — Joseph hops into a rented Porsche and takes off across the desert. He no sooner hits the open road than a coyote darts in front of the speeding car, wrecking it and leaving Joseph stranded in the heat, with no cell phone service — and no ID.
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When Life Gives You a reality check
- By Karla on 11-16-21
By: Bernice McFadden
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Can't Get Enough
- By: Kennedy Ryan
- Length: 14 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Tech mogul Maverick Bell is a dilemma wrapped in an exquisitely tailored suit and knee-melting charm. From their first charged glance at the summer's hottest party, Hendrix feels like she’s met her match. Only he can’t be. Mav may be the first to make her feel this seen and desired and appreciated, but he’s the last one she can have. Forbidden fruit is the juiciest, and this man is off limits if she plans to stay the course she’s set for herself.
By: Kennedy Ryan
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Deacon King Kong
- A Novel
- By: James McBride
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 14 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and, in front of everybody, shoots the project's drug dealer at point-blank range. The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride's funny, moving novel and his first since his National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird.
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Masterpiece
- By Linda G McDonough on 05-17-20
By: James McBride
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I Hate the Ivy League
- Riffs and Rants on Elite Education
- By: Malcolm Gladwell
- Narrated by: Malcolm Gladwell
- Length: 5 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Malcolm Gladwell has long relished the opportunity to skewer the upper echelons of higher education, from the institution of U.S. News & World Report’s Best College rankings to the LSATs to the luxe Bowdoin College cafeteria. I Hate the Ivy League: Riffs and Rants on Elite Education, upends the traditional thinking around how education should work and tries to get to the bottom of why we often reward the wrong people.
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Great content but don’t bother purchasing if you have heard the podcasts
- By katieKo on 10-23-22
By: Malcolm Gladwell
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The Yellow Wife
- A Novel
- By: Sadeqa Johnson
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia, Pheby Delores Brown has lived a relatively sheltered life. Shielded by her mother’s position as the estate’s medicine woman and cherished by the Master’s sister, she is set apart from the others on the plantation, belonging to neither world. She’d been promised freedom on her eighteenth birthday, but instead of the idyllic life she imagined with her true love, Essex Henry, Pheby is forced to leave the only home she has ever known. She unexpectedly finds herself thrust into the bowels of slavery at the infamous Devil’s Half Acre.
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A Real page turner
- By Elizabeth Early on 01-19-21
By: Sadeqa Johnson