If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays (American Lives) - Softcover

Christman, Jill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1496232356 ISBN 13: 9781496232359

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2022

Synopsis

Winner of the 2023 Book of the Year Award from Chicago Writers Association
Finalist for the 2023 Heartland Booksellers Award 
Silver Winner for the 2022 Foreword INDIES Book Award

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.

About this title

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.
 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1496232356
• ISBN 13: 9781496232359
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 228