If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays

by Jill Christman

Overview

2023 Heartland Booksellers Award finalist
Foreword INDIES Silver Winner in Autobiography and Memoir 
Finalist for the 2023 Book of the Year Award from Chicago Writers Association

If This Were Fiction is a love story—for Jill Christman’s long-ago fiancé, who died young in a car accident; for her children; for her husband, Mark; and ultimately, for herself. In this collection, Christman takes on the wide range of situations and landscapes she encountered on her journey from wild child through wounded teen to mother, teacher, writer, and wife. In these pages there are fatal accidents and miraculous births; a grief pilgrimage that takes Christman to jungles, volcanoes, and caves in Central America; and meditations on everything from sexual trauma and the more benign accidents of childhood to gun violence, indoor cycling, unlikely romance, and even a ghost or two.

Playing like a lively mixtape in both subject and style, If This Were Fiction focuses an open-hearted, frequently funny, clear-eyed feminist lens on Christman’s first fifty years and sends out a message of love, power, and hope.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496232359
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	09/01/2022
Series:	American Lives
Pages:	228
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jill Christman is the author of two memoirs, Darkroom: A Family Exposure and Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood. She is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at Ball State University, a senior editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, and executive producer for the podcast Indelible: Campus Sexual Violence.
 

Read an Excerpt

The Sloth

There is a nothingness of temperature, a point on the body’s mercury
where our blood feels neither hot nor cold. I remember a
morning swim on the black sand eastern coast of Costa Rica four
months after my twenty-two-year-old fiancé was killed in a car
accident. Walking into the sea, disembodied by grief, I felt no
barriers between my skin, the air, and the water.

Later, standing under a trickle of water in the wooden outdoor
shower, I heard a rustle, almost soundless, and looking up, expecting
something small, I saw my first three-toed sloth. Mottled and
filthy, he hung by his meat-hook claws not five feet above my head
in the cecropia tree. He peered down at me, his flattened head
turned backward on his neck.

Here is a fact: a sloth cannot regulate the temperature of his
blood. He must live near the equator.

I thought I knew slow, but this guy, this guy was slow. The
sound I heard was his wiry-haired blond elbow, brushed green
with living algae, stirring a leaf as he reached for the next branch.
Pressing my wet palms onto the rough wooden walls, I watched
the sloth move in the shadows of the canopy. Still reaching. And
then still reaching.

What else is this slow? Those famous creatures of slow—the
snail, the tortoise—they move faster. Much. This slow seemed
impossible, not real, like a trick of my sad head. Dripping and
naked in the jungle, I thought, That sloth is as slow as grief. We
were numb to the speed of the world. We were one temperature.

Table of Contents

Part I. since feeling is first
The Sloth
Going Back to Plum Island
The Surprise Baby
The River Cave
Bird Girls
Life’s Not a Paragraph
Part II. we are for each other
Family Portrait
The Eleven-Minute Crib Nap
The Googly Eye
A Stone Pear
Leading the Children Out of Town
Slaughterhouse Island
Part III. And death i think is no parenthesis
The Avocado
The Baby and the Alligator
Aiskhyne
The Lucky Ones
Naked Underneath Our Clothes
Spinning
Acknowledgments
Source Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/13/2022

Christman (Borrowed Babies) considers love, loss, and the art of writing in these luminous essays. The narrative is broken into three parts, each of which is named after a poem by E.E. Cummings, and a main thread pertains to the death of Christman’s fiancé in a car accident at the age of 22 and her life after it. In “Going Back to Plum Island,” Christman grapples with the idea that art can be a form of therapy, initially resisting the notion, but eventually accepting it: “in both (good) therapy and writing, we work our way to a kind of cohesion, an order in the senselessness we can live with.” “The Avocado,” meanwhile, is a moving account of the author reckoning with “how much work I had to do before my body was mine” in the wake of her fiancé’s death, and in “The Sloth,” she memorably compares grief to the mammal’s slow crawl: “This slow seemed impossible, not real.” Christman’s writing is moving and poetic, and she has a knack for imbuing profundity into everyday activities, whether slicing an avocado or climbing a hill. Fans of the personal essay shouldn’t miss these intimate encounters. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Christman’s writing is moving and poetic, and she has a knack for imbuing profundity into everyday activities, whether slicing an avocado or climbing a hill. Fans of the personal essay shouldn’t miss these intimate encounters.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review


“Eloquent and probing, Christman’s essays examine the profound ways relationships can—for better or worse—transform an individual life and provide glimpses into the complexities of the human heart. A warmly wise, intimate memoir.”—Kirkus Reviews


"If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays gives you what you didn't know you needed: sloths and loss and Swedish Fish candy, alligators and avocados and bird girls, pain and loss and hard traveling back to confront that pain, googly eyes and wayward skirts and lipsticks uncapped in purses, electric eye contact with a fetching poet across a dive bar, all woven with joy."—Sonya Huber, Brevity

From the Publisher

2022-07-07
A memoirist and creative writing instructor reflects on transcending personal loss and trauma to embrace the healing love of a successful family life.

“Here are the facts,” writes Christman at the beginning. “As close as I can align the memories and the photographs with the markers of time—birthdays, moves, my mother’s sequential boyfriends and waitressing jobs—Chad [her teenage neighbor] molested me, regularly and sometimes violently, from the time I was six or seven to age twelve.” Memories of those encounters eventually became the basis for a memoir she first submitted as a series of stories to an MFA short fiction class. Yet her catharsis remained incomplete even after the manuscript was published. In this collection, Christman revisits her past to understand how terrible events shaped her attitude toward love and relationships. She begins with a recollection of how the dreams she had about Chad’s abuse continued long after her life, which included a detour into “bulimia and binge drinking,” settled into happier rhythms. But rather than recall his violence, the dreams manifested as terrifying scenarios that involved Chad going after Christman’s own daughter. Her own successful marriage did not come without its own share of twists and turns, including relationships with others, separations, and comic reversals of fortune. Through it all, she writes about the persistent, irrational fear of “the death of those I love.” She attributes her phobia to the death of another man she loved as a young woman, Colin, to whom she had been engaged and who haunted her still. His horrific car crash death brought her into painful awareness that while she could “love a breathing someone…like that, he could be gone.” Eloquent and probing, Christman's essays examine the profound ways relationships can—for better or worse—transform an individual life and provide glimpses into the complexities the human heart.

A warmly wise, intimate memoir.

Kirkus Reviews