Description
“An important and beautiful book” -Katie Gutierrez, bestselling author of More Than You’ll Ever Know
A genre-bending expedition into the treacherous, untamed frontier of childbirth
As she prepared to give birth to her first child, Erica Stern envisioned the idyllic experience promised by prenatal classes and diaper commercials. But when unexpected complications arose during labor, she found herself at the threshold of life and death, a liminal space that connected her to generations of mothers before her.
From the chaos of the delivery room, Frontier opens into a parallel narrative: a Wild West ghost story. There, a mother who didn’t survive the ordeal of childbirth roams her old homestead, tethered to the family she left behind. In this otherworldly hybrid memoir, Stern careens between this haunted past and the present horror of the hospital as she waits for her own son to wake up in the NICU.
Seamlessly blending memoir, fiction, and research into the fraught history of birth-from midwives to Victorian-era sedation through the Natural Childbirth Movement and modern L&D suites-Frontier lays bare visceral truths that are too often glossed over, and offers an incisive look at the momentous and terrifying transformations of motherhood.
Binding Type: Paperback
Author: Erica Stern
Published: 06/03/2025
Publisher: Barrelhouse Inc.
ISBN: 9798985008937
Pages: 208
Weight: 0.54lbs
Size: 0.48″ H x 8.50″ L x 5.50″ W
About the Author
Stern, Erica: – Erica Stern’s work has been published in The Iowa Review, Mississippi Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has received support for her writing from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. A New Orleans native, she lives with her family in Evanston, Illinois.
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