Firstborn Girls - A Memoir

From award-winning author and creative writing teacher 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. 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,

About the author

Bernice L. McFadden is an associate 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.

Product details

• Authors: Bernice L McFadden, Bernice L. McFadden, McFadden Bernice L.
• Publisher: Dutton Books
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 04.03.2025
• EAN: 9780593184974
• ISBN: 978-0-593-18497-4
• No. of pages: 400
• Dimensions: 159 mm x 237 mm x 33 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary Figures, Autobiography: general, Memoirs, Autobiography: literary, Ethnic groups and multicultural studies, Ethnic minorities & multicultural studies, Autobiography: writers, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / African American & Black