First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if, instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?

The Rules:

• Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page.
• Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first.
• Finally… reveal the book!

First Lines:

“According to most of the planet, the second millennium was in its waning months. Soon the calendar would reset to zeros. At that moment, the newspapers said, there was a decent chance all the lights in the world would go dark. But we weren’t worried. In our calendar, we were smack in the middle of the year 5760—just another in the long, sacred crawl of human history.”

This already intrigues me. First of all, because I remember the whole Year 2K panic, but also because the Jewish year (which is referenced here) operates on a completely different calendar, going back much further.

Do you recognize the lines?

Here’s a hint:

This is a memoir.

Still not sure? Here’s another hint:

It is a memoir by Alicia Jo Rabins.

The First Lines Friday book is:

When We’re Born We Forget Everything by Alicia Jo Rabins.

About the Book:

• Title: When We’re Born We Forget Everything
• Author: Alicia Jo Rabins
• Page Length: 304 pages
• Publication Date: March 3, 2026
• Publisher: Schocken

Synopsis:

From the creator of the internationally acclaimed singer-songwriter project Girls in Trouble, a memoir following her journey from a secular Jewish childhood to becoming a modern queer woman owning ancient teachings and finding her own meanings in them, refracted through feminist interpretations of the lives of Biblical women.

As a self-described ‘90s suburban high school weirdo, Alicia Jo Rabins spent her time practicing violin and smoking cigarettes behind the mall while secretly dreaming of setting out on a spiritual quest no one around her seemed to understand. She often found herself drawn to the more ritualistic and rigorous Judaism that her parents had abandoned to assimilate and “become American.” In college, a chance meeting led her on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to study rabbinical texts (and play bluegrass fiddle on the street for cash). But that two years of immersing herself in traditional observance was only the start of a journey full of twists and turns.

When We’re Born We Forget Everything follows Alicia’s relentless, often embarrassing, sometimes enlightening search for the sacred in everyday life as she tours America playing with a klezmer-punk band, falls in and out of love, scrapes through the initiations of motherhood, and witnesses the beauty—and danger—of mysticism. Interwoven throughout, her brief retellings of Biblical women’s stories mirror the mythic structures that permeate contemporary life, bringing the reader on a quest to uncover the feminist teachings that lie buried beneath our patriarchal traditions. The result is both a highly personal, poetic memoir and a universal meditation on spiritual longing.

Links: Goodreads     

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