Havoc ensues when the prettiest girl in school gets a pimple in this humorous and heartwarming novel about friendship and identity.

A New York Public Library Best Book of 2020 A Best Read of 2020 at Ms. Magazine "To read Jenny Zhang is to embrace primal states: pleasure, hunger, longing and rage." —TIME Radiant and tender, My Baby First Birthday is a collection that examines innocence, asking us who gets to be loved and who has to deplete themselves just to survive. Jenny Zhang writes about accepting pain, about the way we fetishize womanhood and motherhood, and reduce women to their violations, traumas, and body parts. She questions the way we feminize and racialize nurturing, and live in service of other people’s dreams. How we idealize birth and being baby, how it’s only in our mothers’ wombs that we’re still considered innocent, blameless, and undamaged, because it’s only then that we don’t have to earn love. Her poems explore the obscenity of patriarchy, whiteness, and capitalism, the violence of rescue and heroism. The magic trick in My Baby First Birthday is that despite all these themes, the book never feels like some jeremiad. Zhang uses friendship as a lyric. She seeks tenderness, radiant beauty, and having love for your mistakes. Through all this, she writes about being alone—really alone, like why-was-I-ever-born alone—and trying, despite everything, to reach out and touch something—skin to skin, animal to animal.

Each chapter is based on phrases from the worship song "He Knows My Name" and communicates the wonder of how God knows each of us in an unspeakably intimate way. Emphasis is on the love of God toward us and the significance of God calling us His children. He knows us, loves us, sympathizes with us, listens to us, has a future for us, forgives us, and delights in us. The chapters end with a prayer acknowledging these truths, promoting worship and gratitude to the Father. Personal testimonies are included from people around the world who have been touched by the Father's love through the words to the song "He Knows My Name."

The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.