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Illustration by Diana Ejaita
Selasi’s story appears in this year’s Fiction Issue, which comes out tomorrow and explores the myriad forms a family can take. The issue also includes fiction by Jonathan Franzen, Annie Ernaux, and Jamil Jan Kochai, plus short memoirs on the subject of “Family Values” by André Alexis, Anne Enright, Joseph O’Neill, Han Ong, and Miriam Toews, and a Personal History by Peter Hessler on the pleasures and the perils of being a newspaper-delivery boy—and the troubling secret about one of his customers that he kept from his parents for years.
In Selasi’s striking story, she encapsulates the experience of being the oldest daughter in an immigrant family—or an F.I.D., as she terms it—and delineates the particular intensity of such a daughter’s relationship with her mother. The work takes the form of a letter from a chorus of these daughters to one of their own. It is a guide to anyone who must navigate a mother’s stringent old-country expectations while growing up in a society that prioritizes the importance of personal fulfillment. The path is often hard, so who would begrudge that F.I.D. a therapy session or two? Her mother, for one. As Selasi writes, “She is sorry, of course, that she made you unhappy and sorrier that the New Country made you ungrateful, but she doesn’t see why you need a therapist at all, much less one who has something against her.” Often irreverent, but frequently wise, “Firstborn Immigrant Daughter” takes its place in the rich literature of migration.
—Cressida Leyshon, deputy fiction editor
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