Firstborn Girls bookcover

Firstborn Girls

A Memoir

This title will be released on

calendar iconMarch 4, 2025

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Description

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.

Product Details

PublisherDutton
Publish DateMarch 04, 2025
Pages400
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconHardback
EAN/UPC9780593184974
Dimensions9.3 X 6.4 X 1.3 inches | 1.2 pounds

About the Author

Bernice L. McFadden is an Assistant Professor of English at Tulane University and the author of several critically acclaimed novels, including Sugar, The Warmest December, Loving Donovan, Nowhere Is a Place, Glorious, Gathering of Waters (a New York Times Editors' Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012), The Book of Harlan (winner of a 2017 American Book Award and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction), and Praise Song for the Butterflies (long-listed for the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction). She is a four-time Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist, as well as the recipient of three awards from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.

Reviews

Praise for Firstborn Girls

“A distinguished novelist explores the history that shaped her and the women in her family. . . . A powerful, richly tapestried book about race, history, love, and the healing power of the written word.”
Kirkus

“Novelist McFadden delivers the captivating, multigenerational stories of her family in a poignant memoir.”
Booklist

“In her remarkable memoir, Bernice McFadden revisits the chaos of girlhood and her journeys as a mother, daughter, and writer, all beneath the specter of white supremacy, patriarchy, and domestic violence. Hailing from generations of hard-loving, bold, flawed Black women, McFadden’s recounting of their lives and intimacies is masterful and mesmerizing. Fueled by compassion and anger, resilience and curiosity, McFadden reveals family secrets, strivings, and struggles, against the backdrop of our country’s long legacy of racial injustice. Revelatory and enthralling, Firstborn Girls is an absolute treasure.”
Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

"Firstborn Girls does what Bernice McFadden does better than absolutely everybody, it takes you on a journey through the ages that makes you feel all of your feelings unabashedly. What makes it more special in her first non-fiction book is that it's her story, her real, lived experience that she has boldly invited us to journey alongside her. Her ability to tell a story makes it one of the most engrossing memoirs I have read in a long time and allows you to forget that it is the real life of a family with such a rich and interesting history. People will talk about these Firstborn Girls for years to come!"
—Tarana Burke, activist and author of Unbound

Firstborn Girls, Bernice McFadden’s riveting memoir, cements her position as one of America’s most creative and necessary writers. Like Toni Morrison who focused her lens specifically on the lives of Black people, and hence told a universal story, so too does McFadden. With Firstborn Girls she has produced a vital and stunningly gorgeous work, again.”
—Sapphire, New York Times bestselling author of Push and The Kid

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