Twenty years in the past, in a Prairie-style group hospital in the course of a Minnesota cornfield, I gave start to my first daughter. Like Erica Stern, I used to be on the sting of a brand new frontier. Like Erica Stern, I had idealized motherhood via tender diaper commercials and anodyne magazines with blisteringly serene mother-baby moments.

Having lived in New Orleans, Stern relocated to Chicago. After my time in Minnesota, I relocated not removed from one other cornfield, but in addition, if I squint, I too, can see Lake Michigan glinting within the distance. It appears we each traveled, not not like pioneers, to start our journey into parenthood. I’m enthusiastic about land and water, bone and amniotic fluid, breath and wind, the crossing of a portal, a threshold from particular person to mother or father, however all the time a author, all the time a worrier.

Frontier: A Memoir & A Ghost Story (Barrelhouse; June 2025), is a deeply uncooked and resonate work, seamlessly mixing fiction with memoir with analysis in probably the most suave and imaginative method, its imaginative prowess hovers over the speculative, very like the ghost of the mom from the Wild West who didn’t survive the ordeal of childbirth and continues to drift alongside the cabin she as soon as occupied and the life she left. This mom watches as her husband remarries and fathers one other youngster, a toddler she feels must be hers, whereas her personal deceased child’s mind bobs in liquid in a jar on the doctor/midwife’s dwelling. What occurred? What went flawed? That’s the primary crux of this mesmerizing, genre-fluid expedition into the usually treacherous, untamed frontier of childbirth, dovetailing effortlessly with Stern’s present-day glass-and-steel lakefront hospital start.

Right here, she writes, is ‘a serene emergency.’ Extra particularly, “His nostril is mercifully spared; an ideal set of nostrils, flattened by gestation and compression and descent, dot each side of a cartilaginous ridge. Wires measuring his oxygen saturation and coronary heart price and electrodes charting mind misfirings should stay slack and unkinked, and baggage linked to his respirator should stay flat, for the smallest fold may disturb the move of treatment or oxygen in or the move of poisons and knowledge out, setting off beeps and alarms that populate the NICU halls, lulling its inhabitants.”

When Stern’s son, Jonah, is born by way of forceps, he experiences issues. Simply why and what may be performed? Stern explores these questions and a lot extra, from a theological Jewish standpoint, the Biblical delusion of Jonah and the whale, whereas taking a cerebral and incisive journalistic method to the all too common expertise of motherhood.

Stern leads the reader via the fraught historical past of start from the Victorian-era sedation via the Pure Childbirth Motion, and modern-day Labor & Supply Suites (‘How will we reserve the nook suite with the lakeview?’ Actually. It’s all there), and the harrowing fact that not all infants—or moms—make it, even on this day of recent medication. Stern’s Frontier is a viscerally necessary learn connecting generations of moms and writers from the previous to right this moment.

As Stern closes in on a analysis for her toddler son, she likens the expertise to Freytag’s pyramid, that’s, she writes, ‘Sciences has no title for this. I’m not certain literature does, both.[…] Jonah’s story refuses to stick to the neat diagram [of Freytag]. There’s rising motion, disaster, falling motion, then scramble.”

Questions persist, however the ones about sacrifice and parenting and telling a darn-good story, one which resonates and transforms and connects, will all the time be on the coronary heart of identification.