Play Audiobook Sample
The Family Roe: An American Story Audiobook
Play Audiobook Sample
(0.00) - 0 listener ratings
Quick Stats About this Audiobook
Total Audiobook Chapters:
Longest Chapter Length:
Shortest Chapter Length:
Average Chapter Length:
Audiobooks by this Author:
Publisher Description
A masterpiece of reporting on the Supreme Court's most divisive case, Roe v. Wade, and the unknown lives at its heart.
Despite her famous pseudonym, “Jane Roe,” no one knows the truth about Norma McCorvey (1947–2017), whose unwanted pregnancy in 1969 opened a great fracture in American life. Journalist Joshua Prager spent hundreds of hours with Norma, discovered her personal papers—a previously unseen trove—and witnessed her final moments. The Family Roe presents her life in full. Propelled by the crosscurrents of sex and religion, gender and class, it is a life that tells the story of abortion in America.
Prager begins that story on the banks of Louisiana’s Atchafalaya River, where Norma was born, and where unplanned pregnancies upended generations of her forebears. A pregnancy then upended Norma’s life too, and the Dallas waitress became Jane Roe.
Drawing on a decade of research, Prager reveals the woman behind the pseudonym, writing in novelistic detail of her unknown life from her time as a sex worker in Dallas, to her private thoughts on family and abortion, to her dealings with feminist and Christian leaders, to the three daughters she placed for adoption.
Prager found those women, including the youngest—Baby Roe—now fifty years old. She shares her story in The Family Roe for the first time, from her tortured interactions with her birth mother, to her emotional first meeting with her sisters, to the burden that was uniquely hers from conception.
The Family Roe abounds in such revelations—not only about Norma and her children but about the broader “family” connected to the case. Prager tells the stories of activists and bystanders alike whose lives intertwined with Roe. In particular, he introduces three figures as important as they are unknown: feminist lawyer Linda Coffee, who filed the original Texas lawsuit yet now lives in obscurity; Curtis Boyd, a former fundamentalist Christian, today a leading provider of third-trimester abortions; and Mildred Jefferson, the first black female Harvard Medical School graduate, who became a pro-life leader with great secrets.
An epic work spanning fifty years of American history, The Family Roe will change the way you think about our enduring American divide: the right to choose or the right to life.
Download and start listening now!
“A masterpiece of journalistic research…Prager challenges readers’ presuppositions and refuses to fit the book’s messy stories into clear moral categories.”
— Christianity Today
Quotes
-
“A masterclass in reporting…to reveal a rich tapestry of American life and values in the twentieth-century."
— Time -
“Prodigiously researched, richly detailed, sensitively told.…like a fairy tale set in working-class America.”
— New Yorker -
“An honest glimpse into the American soul...a sweeping, granular, century-deep case for women’s sovereignty over themselves.”
— New York Times Book Review -
“Extraordinary reporting…Prager’s narrative contains multitudes."
— Christian Century -
“An epic story worthy of the impact this one case has had on the American psyche.”
— NPR
Awards
-
A Time Magazine Best Book of the Year
-
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
-
A NPR Best Book of the Year
-
Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction
-
Finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize
-
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
-
A New York Times Book Review pick of Best Books Now in Paperback
The Family Roe Listener Reviews
Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
About Joshua Prager
Joshua Prager is an author of several books, including The Echoing Green, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and The Family Roe, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He is a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard and Fulbright Distinguished Chair, and he has written for The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
About Elisabeth Rodgers
Elisabeth Rodgers is an actress and AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator. After graduating from Princeton University, she completed a two-year program at William Esper Studio, where she studied with Maggie Flanigan. Her audiobook narration training came from Robin Miles, who has also directed her in several productions. She has recorded dozens of books for a multitude of publishers.