FIRSTBORN GIRLS

A distinguished novelist explores the history that shaped her and the women in her family.

In 1967, a year that saw almost 160 race riots across the United States, 2-year-old McFadden and her mother, Vivian, survived a fiery car crash that marked them for life. Both were survivors; in this memoir, McFadden reveals how both were scarred, not only by race and gender, but by a family history of “festering wounds.” Like Vivian, the author witnessed violence—brought about through her father’s alcoholism—and disarray at home. She contemplated taking her “exit” at age 7, until her paternal grandmother offered her summer stays at her home in Barbados. McFadden observes that when she was a teenager, Vivian made her a “fully indentured third parent” to more children she had with the husband who abused her. McFadden temporarily escaped from family “servitude” to a boarding school, graduated, then reluctantly returned home. Yet it was in that chaotic space that she also began writing personal stories and reading Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. That novel helped her embrace the beauty of being a young Black woman—and also her childhood dream of becoming a writer. What makes McFadden’s book so absorbing is the way it quietly demonstrates how history is “a hard thing to shake.” Patterns—like out-of-wedlock pregnancies and interfamilial or social violence—are repeated. But they need not determine outcomes: once they are accepted and honored, they can forge fulfilling paths forward.

A powerful, richly tapestried book about race, history, love, and the healing power of the written word.