What Are Newborns Trying to Tell Us?

In Premiers cris (or First Cries, published by Editions Seuil), journalist Clémentine Goldszal recounts the six months she spent immersed in the neonatology department at Hôpital Necker-Enfants malades in Paris. It was the first time this hospital unit, one of the most sophisticated in Europe, agreed to open its doors to a journalist for an extended period of time to witness its work saving premature babies. 

Goldszal recounts the harrowing first days of several newborns, including Fiona, Souleymane and Rose, while following the work of the hospital caregivers and the parents’ reactions. At the same time, she examines a range of cultural representations of these babies, including Freud, Nan Goldin, the swaddled creature in David Lynch’s Eraserhead, Amy Heckerling’s film Look Who’s Talking and the artist Ron Mueck, with his larger-than-life sculptures.

A hybrid testimony and feat of journalism, both subjective and profound, Premiers cris is a fascinating investigation nourished by philosophy, literature and Goldszal’s own history. The book is out now in French, but worry not, international readers: Pushkin Press has acquired the rights for the United Kingdom and will publish it in English in 2026; Gatopardo will release it in Spanish; and DTV, in German.

Where did the idea for the book come from?

CG I tend to say that it came from the fact that I had a baby myself. I loved him and I understood some of him, but I also felt, with a lot of his communication towards me, I was lost. At the hospital, his pediatrician and his osteopath understood things about him that I couldn’t. So there was this big question mark: what is this thing I gave birth to?

I had a feeling we don’t pay a lot of attention to the newborns we once were. That was confirmed when I sought answers in literature and movies – where I normally seek answers for any question that I have in life – psychoanalysis, philosophy; it was very scarce. Technically, you’re a newborn for the first 28 days of your life, and then you become an infant. It is a period that is very specific, it’s neither here nor there. You’re so small and weird looking, extremely vulnerable. 

What is neonatology, exactly?

CG When everything goes well, you’re in the maternity ward, you give birth to your baby, you’re probably in such a haze that you don’t even see a pediatrician check on them. You stay at the hospital for a few hours if you’re in the States or the UK, or a few days if you’re in France, and then you’re sent home with your baby. If something goes wrong with the baby – if it has signs of respiratory distress, if its heart seems to be having problems, or if they’ve detected before the birth that something may be wrong – then it’s taken to NICU, the neonatal intensive care unit. There, it’s another sort of care, completely focused on this very specific organism, the newborn. That’s what neonatology is. It’s pretty recent, too, like 60 years old. Before, it was under pediatrics. 

It was the first time they let someone report from Hôpital Necker in this manner.

CG They have a lot of requests, but my request was a little special, because it was for a long time. I said from the get-go, ‘I want to be there with you for a long time,’ and it was the first time he [Professor Alexandre Lapillonne, head of neonatology] said yes to that. I think it’s because I presented the project to the head of the unit that I wanted to look at the babies. I wasn’t really interested in the parents or the caregivers – even though they come into the story, they’re more a backdrop. My focus was on the patients: the newborns. 

I think he agreed because he understood that you gain from being seen. It’s true of the newborns and of the caregivers, who suffer as well. 

Did you ever find the reporting process emotionally overwhelming? 

CG I was protected by my function: I was there to report. It would have been indecent of me to let any of my feelings get in the way of what everybody was doing. It was, fundamentally, more interesting than heartbreaking – though it was heartbreaking at times. I also love medicine, I’m fine with blood. My dad was a dermatologist, and when I was a kid he had VHS tapes of small surgeries that I would watch and watch again.  

When you enter this world, there’s a whole vocabulary, even a different grammar, that doctors use. At the same time I was there, my son was starting to talk, and I really felt like I could imagine how he was grasping things from what he would hear grown-ups say. I was observing how he learned to talk. I felt like a child in the unit: I was grasping things, misunderstanding a lot of things, then I would Google it or ask a nurse who would go, “No, no, no, you misunderstood.” This interested me because it’s not often in our grown-up life, when you speak well, that you find yourself in an environment where it’s your language but it’s also completely foreign. 

What did you learn about the mysteries of newborns?

CG I learned to accept that they will remain mysteries. Like everything, if you look at it for a long time with attention and try to decipher it and understand it with empathy, then communication arises. You have to be in communication with newborns for them to communicate with you.  It’s something you feel even if you hold a baby. You feel they’re beings. I’m shocked that, in society, people talk to their dogs, but it’s less admitted that you can address a newborn and say, “How are you doing?” The fact it won’t respond in language doesn’t make your question less valuable.

As much as you learned about the subject, it remains mysterious.

CG That’s the beauty of it. Now that I think of it, that’s what I loved about this project: in some respect, it was meant to fail. I would be circling around this mystery but I knew I would never arrive. 

There’s an interesting chapter about the fact that there are few realistic representations of newborns in art, literature and cinema. Why do you think that is?

CG It’s very often stylized. So, in religious paintings, baby Jesus – the most famous newborn of all time, in the west at least – is always a very chubby baby, and if you know babies, it’s three or four months old. It’s not a newborn. 

Then, movies: Look Who’s Talking is a movie from the ’90s with John Travolta, Kirstie Alley and Bruce Willis as the voice of the baby. I loved this movie when I was a kid. It’s a movie that decides to make a baby the protagonist. It’s by a woman, of course, Amy Heckerling. You have the birth scene and one scene in the maternity ward with actual newborns – they speak and it’s very funny. But by the next scene, it’s obviously a three-or four-month-old baby. There’s a technical side here – it’s very hard to find [newborns], though you’ll always find parents who want their babies to be on set. And also it’s not pretty, it’s not cute. It’s disturbing, it feels so fragile. 

I came to the conclusion that the best representation of what it is to face a newborn is in horror movies. It’s David Lynch’s Eraserhead, with this horrifying worm-like thing. I think that’s closer to the newborn, and what it evokes in you when you look at it, than a four-month-old baby.

In visual arts, there are a lot more representations. Ron Mueck really tackled the thing with his series on babies – they’re humongous babies and they’re actually newborns. In Mueck’s art, I recognize the newborn. He wants to disturb, and it’s interesting that, in his will to disturb his audience, he identified that putting a newborn in a museum would make people react.

In literature, I have no real explanation, to be honest. My only explanation is that literature, for a very long time, was a place for men, and it’s quite recent that men are faced with newborns. Your wife would give birth, do her woman thing with other women, and 20 days later she’d emerge from the room with the baby. Maybe the father would be interested in the baby, but most of the time he’d be interested in the child once it had grown up – or so he says. 

Why do you think philosophers have shown such little interest in the subject?

CG Montaigne thought about everything, wrote about everything, he’s such a humanist. And yet, there’s a passage where he’s basically like, “I don’t understand that people would cry on the fate of these babies that are so small, you can doubt they have a soul.” It’s very intense. Also, it’s society shielding itself from the fact that a lot of newborns died. Maybe, if we were as devastated as we are today, nobody would have survived having a family, because you had 10 children and several of them died. You had to shield yourself from the grief. 

Tell us about deciding on the form of your book: part reporting, part first-person. 

CG It’s all mixed together. I thought it would be interesting [to use the first-person perspective], and it made it fluid for me to see something and say, “That makes me wonder…” I spent a lot of time in this unit taking things from the babies, the parents, the caregivers, and it was important to somehow give back in the writing. You can’t ask people to strip while remaining completely clothed. I didn’t strip completely in the book because I don’t want to, I’m coy and I like my privacy, but I felt I had to give something back and voice my interrogations and limitations. I think maybe the reader can associate with this “I.”

Did writing this book change anything about your perception of birth, life and death?

CG I’m always afraid of everything. I was aware that this existed and, when I was pregnant, I was aware it could go very wrong. It confirmed my intuition that it could go very wrong. I saw these babies come into Necker, they were born somewhere else and they were fine until they were terribly not fine. But also, it taught me that things can go very wrong for babies and grown-ups, and you can survive and be well. 

You see these babies born very early, they’re very sick, it’s hard to see. It’s a terrible way to come into the world. But since the book has come out, people come to me and say, “I was born at 25 weeks,” “I was extremely premature,” and you’re completely fine. There’s also a conversation about disabled babies. They fight for visibility, and we have to fight for their visibility.