Join Niccara as she welcomes the incomparable Bernice L. McFadden — national bestselling, award-winning author of Sugar, The Book of Harlan, and Praise Song for the Butterflies — to the pod for a tender, wide-open conversation about First Born Girls, her first memoir. After a lifetime of writing other people's stories, Bernice finally turns the pen on herself, and we sit with everything that excavation asks of you. We talk about opening the book with her mother literally resurrecting her, the craft choice of calling her elders by their given names so she could tell the whole truth, and tracing her maternal line all the way back to 1822 Georgia. We get into eldest-daughter syndrome and the gift and the weight firstborn girls carry, writing with her ancestors and not just about them, disassociation as protection while confronting the page every day for three and a half years, questioning and unlearning religion, and why history doesn't repeat — it rhymes. Perfect for readers who appreciate ancestral reverence, maternal legacy, generational trauma and healing, spiritual reckoning, and the courage it takes to finally tell your own story after telling everyone else's.
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