The cover of the writer Lauren Christensen’s memoir features a black blot, a hazy orange mass blooming outward. A poppy, probably, though the image lends itself to something more wound-like—something abstract and formless.
In Firstborn: A Memoir, a woolly grief we don’t have many words for looms large, but Christensen admirably finds a shape for it. Firstborn follows the loss that Christensen, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, and her husband, Gabriel Bump, experience when they discover that their unborn daughter, Simone, is dying in the womb.
At 22 weeks, the couple—who lived in North Carolina at the time of the writing (Bump is a visiting professor at UNC-Chapel Hill and occasional INDY freelancer)—also learn that Christensen’s life is endangered the longer she carries the unviable pregnancy to term. Here, North Carolina’s abortion laws come into grim focus: at the time, it was not legal to terminate a pregnancy after 20 weeks (as of July 2023, that time frame has dramatically shortened to 12 weeks), and Christensen must travel out of state for the procedure.
Firstborn begins with Christensen and Bump holding the body of the baby they have eagerly loved and longed for and then loops back, moving between Christensen’s childhood, the couple’s whirlwind love story, the death of a beloved grandparent, and, finally, the devastating loss of Simone. Christensen’s writing style is casual and candid, even as a depth of raw feeling wells up, articulating an isolating experience that many women have had or brushed up against.
“My need for my mother felt as mighty as my need for motherhood, for my daughter,” Christensen writes, the directive clear, tender, and immediate. Christensen and Bump have since moved back to New York but were back in town for a March 25 reading at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill; on the occasion, the INDY called Christensen to talk about Firstborn, grief, and writing.
INDY: The title of the book is Firstborn. I’m curious how you landed on that.
LAUREN CHRISTENSEN: The actual way that I landed on that title was that I had, for some reason, attached myself to a verse from a poem by Louise Glück. It was from “The Wild Iris.” I had just read the poem before as I was writing, and just really liked it. Hold on, I really want to find [the line]—“the stiff earth bending a little.”
It was the title of the Word doc as I was working on this, and my editor was like, “OK, let’s just leave it as the working title.” And then eventually they were kind of like, “This doesn’t really work; it doesn’t tell us anything about what the book is like. Can you come up with something else?”
And then I saw that Louise Glück actually published a book called Firstborn, her first collection of poems, and there’s this title poem I really loved. When I saw that, I was like, “This is perfect, and not even as a reference to Louise Glück.” It just felt like the most perfect summation of what I was trying to do. It clicked for everyone.
But it was hard settling on the right kind of title. I didn’t want to use her name for some reason. Her name is throughout the book, but that didn’t feel exactly what I wanted it to be.
The thematic resonance of you also being your mom’s firstborn—was that established, or did it, you know, glue things together?
Definitely, because it’s so much about my experience of being a daughter and the kind of motherhood that I grew up knowing, as well as this sense of, you know, she had to be born still. I really did want to make that very clear. A central part of my experience with her was the actual birthing, so that felt very meaningful to me.
It’s also an allusion to the fact that she wasn’t my only child—she turned out to not be my only child, but without, you know, making that explicit, because I didn’t really want this to be about my son. She will always be the first.
I’m curious about the role of your mom in the book—was that something that evolved with time? What role did she play between drafts?
The first draft that I sent—I wouldn’t even call it a draft, it was just what I’d written for myself in the immediate moments after coming home from the hospital. I showed the document to my husband, and then he urged me to send it to my agent. That first document had nothing about my mom, besides the fact that she was there with me throughout those nine days.
My agent was the one to, very astutely and gently, point out—and he didn’t know anything about my relationship with my mom, besides what he was reading—and he was like, “I feel like you’re really writing around something; I can feel something there, and I want to encourage you to explore it further because it feels like there’s a really big piece of the puzzle that’s there but not there.”
That was tough. Everything about Simone, everything about what happened, because it was so immediate, it just came out. I’m not going to say it was easy to write, but it just came out very naturally. The stuff about my mom was so much harder to write—it’s a much less contained story. How do I decide which pieces from my over 33 years to put in? And also, you know—Simone will never read it. My mother will. Thankfully, we’re very close, and I didn’t do anything without talking to her and showing her many drafts, which in itself was complicated.
I think it must be very hard to read what your child writes about you as a mother, good or bad. I think it was very emotional for her, and she’s a very private person. So I do consider this a real gift that she’s given to Simone, to let me write about her in such an exposed way. I’m making it sound like I’m airing dirty laundry, but I don’t think that’s what it is.
It’s complicated to write about family, no matter what you’re writing.
Yeah, and it’s not a surface portrayal, the way, maybe my portrayals of other people in my life in the book are—it’s deeper than that.
I looked up some of Elizabeth McCracken’s writings [referenced in Firstborn] after reading this, and there was one interview where she talked about her approach to writing about her experience [of stillbirth] as an urge or a compulsion to write her son’s memoir. Did you have a similar goal in mind?
It’s interesting to hear that—I haven’t seen that interview, and now I want to go look at that. I do remember looking at the dates and noticing that her book was published several years after the death of her son, so it does seem like there would be a kind of intention there—“OK, what am I doing with this memory?”
In publishing, everything happened very quickly. I was writing, not thinking it was a book. When I came home from the hospital, the goal—if I had a goal—it was just all I could do. I had, thankfully, six weeks off from work for disability leave. And so I didn’t have any actual responsibilities besides my dog, you know, so I did have this time. I wasn’t really able to do anything other than write things down.
I guess if there was a compulsion—I think that’s a good word—it was just knowing how, even in that moment, even when I felt like I would never not be grieving, knowing some part of this state I was in was temporary, wanting to hold on to that state. Like anyone who’s grieved, you have this feeling that you almost don’t want to stop being sad because then you feel like you’ll be farther from the person that you miss. And in this kind of indulgence or safety and actively mourning, it just feels like “I don’t have to do or think about anything else.” I wanted to document that, to preserve that immediate moment, because it was so unlike anything else I’d ever experienced in my life.
The decision to publish it is a whole different story. I still struggle with it sometimes—what have I done? The ultimate thought I keep coming back to is that the reason I wanted this to exist for strangers to read is just feeling like it, in some minute way, makes her exist in this eternal way far beyond me. Even if it just lives on a shelf somewhere.
Can you explain how North Carolina’s abortion restrictions played into your pregnancy and the decisions that you had to make?
At the time that I was pregnant, which was the end of 2022 into the beginning of 2023, the law restricted termination after 20 weeks and six days, and I happened to be beyond that point. Now, as we are talking, it’s 12 weeks.
Termination didn’t come into my mind until it had to, so I was not aware of the law, to be honest—which I am now a little bit ashamed to admit. It wasn’t something that factored in. I wanted to keep my child. By the time we’d been to several doctors’ offices, it became clear that Simone was not going to survive, that she had severe organ failure resulting from genetic abnormalities. Essentially, she had kidney failure, which was explained to me by the time it was explained that I had a choice between continuing with the pregnancy and waiting for her to die on her own, or terminating.
I told the doctors termination could be on the table, [but] I’m not going to take that choice. But they kept trying to hammer this into me, that it was very dangerous for me to continue the pregnancy. That part I still struggle to remember, because I didn’t feel sick at the time. But the longer her kidneys were failing inside of me, the more at risk my own organs became. Preeclampsia was the risk resulting from something called mirror syndrome, and all of this was just kind of medical terminology to me.
I had this delusional belief that I could die and she could live. It had to be hammered into me that the choice was between her dying or both of us dying. What came as a shock was when the doctors at Duke said to me, “OK, if you choose to terminate to save your life, we can’t do that here and will have to refer you out of state.”
I had, somewhat recently, moved here from New York, so I had a very obvious place that I would go—a childhood bedroom in New York, and all my doctors, still; it hadn’t been that long since I’d emailed my gynecologist in New York. I had all these references ready to be called on, and that is what I did. I was able to fly up, with my mother next to me, sleep in my childhood home, and recover there for a few days. It really struck me through that process—what I just kept thinking was, “What would I have done if I didn’t have such a safety net?”
Prior to these restrictions, I think a lot of people weren’t familiar with these scenarios and how common it is for doctors to have to intervene in nonviable pregnancies. We didn’t have to think about it as much before, because it was legal, but also because it’s really hard to put a shape around miscarriage and pregnancies gone wrong, so people just don’t talk about it.
I feel like the terminology we have is sort of misleading. I don’t really know what word to use for what happened. Was it a stillbirth? I had an abortion. I didn’t technically have a miscarriage. There’s this veneer of clarity, like you could just so easily put something into one category or another, but that just belies the actual complexity and greatness of the beginning of life. I continue to not know how to describe what has happened.
I also want to say that I always feel uncomfortable suggesting that more people have to talk about things that happen to them. Just because I’m perhaps too comfortable talking about my personal experiences, I do not think other people have to talk about it. What I hope is that people who want to, people who feel that it might help them, open up a conversation for anyone who wants to take part in it. But by no means do I think that you have to share.
You mentioned the Elizabeth McCracken book—were there other memoirs, or resources that you looked to while you were thinking about how to approach this?
There were books I had read before that came back to my mind. I’m thinking of one in particular—Ariel Levy’s The Rules Do Not Apply, which was not specifically a memoir of miscarriage.
She wrote a really devastating essay about it, “Thanksgiving in Mongolia.”
Yes, exactly. There was something about that immediacy—”unflinching” is so overused, but it did not spare the graphic details. And I remember reading that, when it came out, long before I ever considered becoming a parent, and feeling like, “God, this is immediate writing, this is really in the trenches. I don’t feel the separation between the page and the event,” which is such a remarkable talent on the writer’s part.
That was something I wanted to do with my book, to preserve real proximity to the event itself. There are other memoirs—I’m thinking a lot lately about Joan Didion’s Blue Nights—that are more removed, you know, deliberately. It’s a more stylized, reflective consideration of a grief that happened somewhat in the past. But that just wasn’t what I was writing.
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