The Heart Folds Early - (American Lives) by Jill Christman (Paperback)

About the Book

Courageous, clear-eyed, tender, and unexpectedly funny, Jill Christman's story folds the mournful recklessness of the young widow she was against the backdrop of her later marriage and new motherhood, including the choice to end a half-term pregnancy when a routine ultrasound reveals her baby has only half a heart.

Book Synopsis

This book is about what it means to make a choice. As mothers, how do we carry life and death in our bodies and survive with our hearts intact?

The Heart Folds Early is a story of transformation through tragedy, and an examination of the way in which great loss can make us simultaneously fearful and intrepid. Emerging from a childhood that included both devastating sexual abuse and the sustaining joy of being deeply (if imperfectly) loved, Jill Christman's sights were set on building and protecting her own happy family--until her fiancé was killed in a car accident.

Christman folds the mournful recklessness of the young widow she was against the backdrop of her later marriage and new motherhood, including the choice to end a half-term pregnancy when a routine ultrasound revealed her baby boy had just half a heart. Courageous, clear-eyed, tender, and unexpectedly funny, Christman's book reflects on her life and asks: What happens when we're afraid the worst thing will happen and then, sometimes, it does? What does it mean to make and live with a heartrending choice? How do we carry life and death in our bodies and survive with our hearts intact?

Review Quotes

"The Heart Folds Early is a brilliant, breathtaking memoir about the dignity and necessity of our choices, and how everybody bears griefs unforeseen that, at times, hardly seem survivable. Jill Christman writes about the toughest matters of human existence with a directness, empathy, and humor that is the closest thing I'll ever know to love born from a page. I'm so grateful for this book, for this narrator's wisdom, for her heart."--Brooke Champagne, author of Nola Face: A Latina's Life in the Big Easy

"At once fierce and exquisitely tender, The Heart Folds Early is a breathtaking journey into the mind of a mother grappling with an impossible choice. Jill Christman has written a profoundly generous book, offering her story with open palms and, in doing so, affirming the right of every woman to be the authority on her own body and life."--Nicole Graev Lipson, author of Mothers and Other Fictional Characters

"This book is a continuous wonder, a compulsively readable story told with keen wisdom and nerves of steel about the fierce desire to grow and birth babies from a full life of one's own. Christman plows right through the pastel curtain around labor and delivery, revealing exactly why the mother and creator of life must wield the power to control this dangerous, bloody, and powerful act and to choose a future for herself and her children."--Sonya Huber, author of Voice First: A Writer's Manifesto

About the Author

Jill Christman is the author of If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays (Nebraska, 2022), Darkroom: A Family Exposure, and Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood. She is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at Ball State University, where she serves as editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative and Beautiful Things.