Firstborn girls : four generations, one extraordinary story

McFadden, Bernice L.2025

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Summary

On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died. She was in a car crash on the motorway turnoff to Detroit. For a few minutes, she was clinically dead. From the moment of her resuscitation, we follow a remarkable life, all the way up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar. In 80s Brooklyn, growing up in terror of her alcoholic father, young Bernice loses herself in books, finding solace in summer trips to her aunt's home in Barbados and escaping to boarding school. But it's not until she reads 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. Bernice's family story begins in Sandersville, Georgia, with freedwoman Louisa Vicey Wilson in 1870.