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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Annelie Geissler
Categories
Memoirs

FIRST BORN GIRLS

Bernice L. McFadden

A Memoir

This is necessary work. This is love work. This is legacy literature about me and mine born into a world run by them and theirs.

On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died. She was in a car crash on the motorway turnoff to Detroit where her mother pulled her from the flaming automobile just before her heart stopped beating. For a few minutes, she was clinically dead. From the moment of her resuscitation, FIRST BORN GIRLS follows a remarkable life, all the way up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar. In eighties Brooklyn, growing up in terror of her alcoholic father, young Bernice loses herself in books, finding solace in summer trips to Barbados and escaping to boarding school. But it's not until she comes across the novels of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, stories about "messy, beautiful, joyful Black people" so reminiscent of her loved ones, that she sees herself within their pages. Braided through Bernice's story is that of her family story, beginning in Sandersville, Georgia, with freedwoman Louisa Vicey Wilson in 1870 whose descendants survived Reconstruction, Jim Crow, joined the 'great migration', and cried when Dr King was assassinated during The Civil Rights Movement. We see wisdom, secrets, and fierce love passed down through generations of women like Lou's handmade quilt. Tracing these roots gives Bernice the strength to write her own story, liberating herself from generational trauma while honoring her ancestors. A memoir of many threads, FIRST BORN GIRLS is an extraordinarily moving account of a life shaped both by family history and a drive to be something more. Bernice L. McFadden is an Assistant Professor of English at Tulane and the author of several critically acclaimed novels including Praise Song for the Butterflies (longlisted for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction), Sugar, Loving Donovan, Nowhere Is a Place, The Warmest December, Gathering of Waters (a New York Times Editors' Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012), Glorious, and The Book of Harlan (winner of a 2017 American Book Award and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction). She is a four-time Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist, as well as the recipient of three awards from the BCALA.

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Book Published 2025-03-01 by Dutton Books

Comments

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.

UK: Chatto

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!

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.