Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story

by Erica Stern

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

208 pages, Paperback

Published June 3, 2025

Reviews

[Lily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. What an incredible, incredible book. And I'm not just saying that because the author is my sister-in-law and the baby is my oldest nephew Jonah. Objectively, this is such a gorgeously written, genre-bending piece of work. It had me gasping through tears more times than I can count.

Erica Stern (funny to write out her full name) writes about the traumatic birth of her first-born son, equally terrified by the implications of his brain injury and what's to come, and resentful of the lie sold to her through baby-books and Buy Buy Baby about what birth and newborn-hood would look like. I remember hearing snippets of this time of Erica and Jed's life through text messages and worried conversations with my parents. But to be thrown into those tense and scary two weeks in the NICU was eye-opening.

Partway through, we are launched into the Wild West where another mother dies while giving birth along with the baby. She haunts the site of the birth/death and watches her husband's new wife and their new baby. Her own baby, in the form of a dybbuk, enters this new baby. I loved the ghost story descriptions. The woman, incorporeal and hovering up in the ceiling, thinks she can feel the new baby's breath on her cheek, despite not having a cheek or the ability to feel anything physical. These scenes were just gripping. Visceral and raw and gross during the labor scene, and then ethereal and other-worldly after the death scene. What a ride.

Erica intersperses the memoir part with thoroughly researched anecdotes from birth and obstetrics history and a wonderful critique of the natural birthing movement today (which I have absolutely no stomach for.) She writes about the Victorian "paragon of a woman who feels just the right amount of pain," because while birth should be painful, to remind a woman of her weakness and inferiority, she should also not be in too much pain because birth and child-rearing should be the things that she is built for. She also adds in some Judeo-Christian ideas about God and death. I loved this description of Jed's version of Judaism, inspired by our own grandfather: "his Jewish identity is purely cultural, the question of divine force utterly laughable. He's the grandchild of a man who'd cast aside the Yiddishkeit of his immigrant parents--the old traditions and superstitions--and proudly remade himself as a suave and worldly Kansas City lawyer and contemporary-art collector, replacing the ancient with the modern. Jed inherited this outlook." What a perfect and concise way to describe Arthur Kase! She had some really nice descriptions of my brother as a steady, calming force, which he absolutely is. Gotta love Jed.

I was just totally, totally amazed by this debut. Highly, highly, highly recommended.

[Ashley Skinner Conrad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frontier is unlike any memoir I’ve read – it’s full of beautiful prose and rich language while at the same time raw and accessible. It blends genres together seamlessly and in a unique way. Altogether, it’s profoundly moving; I could not put it down. Even though Erica’s birth experience is unlike any I’ve had, I found myself able to relate to her modern-day birth journey because she speaks to so many universal truths of what it is like to become a mother. I felt especially seen when she talks about the out of body experience and splitting of herself during the labor and birthing process. The lack of control, the shock of unmet expectations, the uncertainty – Erica put language to a kind of vulnerability and truth that often goes unspoken, and she does so with grace and honesty.
I was also deeply drawn in by the way she used the ghost story in the Wild West chapters as a metaphor to tell even more truths. The haunting elements aren’t just narrative devices – they illuminate the lingering presence of grief, memory, time, and all the things we carry but can’t always name.
This book is beautifully structured, educational, and emotionally resonant, with a voice that is both deeply personal and strikingly universal. This book will linger with me, like a ghost in the best way.

[Jennifer Morrill · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received a signed copy as a birthday present (thanks Nicole and Dan!) and I’m so glad. This was unlike anything I’ve read before. Part memoir, part research paper, part fictional ghost story, all blended together beautifully.

If birth trauma and infant loss triggers you, this is not the book for you. The author recounts her own child’s birth and the historical impacts, expectations, and impacts of religion and faith on pregnancy.

I know the concept is strange but I really would recommend this book.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been reading all sorts of horror stories about pregnancy on purpose for some reason. This one is about the author's traumatic birth of her son who suffers brain damage at birth because of lack of oxygen. There's also a story of a woman on the western frontier (where? when?) who dies in childbirth to a stillborn child. The writing was very MFA-ish, which is a natural part of many writers' development, but seemed to try to interweave a lot of different ideas when I would have preferred them to be more lumpy. There were a few points where Stern touched on the history of the medicalization of childbirth, but they felt shallow. Her few book sources on childbirth are all pre-2000.

The ghost story was a little interesting, but as someone who has done a bit of research on daily life in the 19th century west, I wanted more details. The scene where the second wife washes her clothes in an icy river seemed absurd to me (why not just bring the water in and heat it up?). The lack of grounded detail about their lives made it difficult for me to empathize with the characters.

Overall, I think this book was best when Stern was describing her own experiences with the uncertainty of having a baby in the NICU with brain damage. As the mother of a disabled child, I wish she had written more about the following years as well. Overall I think this book would have been better as a series of short essays.

[Shayne Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have never read a book like this before. FRONTIER tells three stories: one is a harrowing present-tense account of the author's first birth experience; the second is historical fiction about a frontierswoman who dies during childbirth and becomes a ghost who haunts her husband's next wife and baby; the third, woven in, is a researched history of the industrialization of birth.

Just as we have no adequate words for describing pain, we have no language up to the task of conveying the fullness of birth, but Stern uses genre — she employs tropes of both the ghost story and the western — to go where a more straightforward birth story wouldn't or couldn't. This book is masterfully written and a beautiful addition to the birth/postpartum canon.

[Noah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I tore through this book in three days--and for me, memoirs aren't usually the genre that I just can't put down. Stern's telling of the birth of her first child -- with serious complications -- never lets up on its emotional intensity, even while she adds in razor-sharp observations and analysis of the culture of pregnancy and motherhood. There were places where I was holding my breath.

The memoir is the core of the book, but then it expands in multiple directions to try to grasp the meaning of birth and motherhood, with both life and death on the line (independently and as a pair). The "Wild West ghost story" gets top billing, but personally, I was especially drawn in by the meditations on Jewish theology, folklore, and identity, which are incredibly wise and well-deployed.

[Adin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I love the conceit of this book: the interspersal of memoir and ghost story. I had an extremely traumatic birth experience (also a traumatic experience trying to get pregnant) and like Stern I felt cheated by the way the culture treats pregnancy and birth as uniformly positive, beautiful experiences. Stern raises important philosophical questions raised about the relationship between mind and body and what happens to it during and after birth. But for me she did not do quite enough to probe them, so the book never really came together to achieve the depth of insight I was hoping for. It was a driving read but I think that was because I was always wishing for more.

[Lindsey Kach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written, full of feeling, and spirituality adapted to modern life as a woman.

[Sydney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Born out of intense fear, I thought this was a shockingly fearless book. Through an impressive feat of memory and research and sheer invention, Stern lays bare the dangers, myths, and mysteries of childbirth and the uncertain, uneasy assumption of the role of becoming a new mother.

The real people in the memoir segments and the fictional characters in the Wild West/ghost story segments weave together a taut web of shared hopes, frank truths, and devastating losses. Though it sounds like a tough book to read, the writing is so lyrical and the insights so plentiful that one is carried along with tenderness from start to finish.

I highly, highly, highly recommend this exquisite book!