Established in 2018, TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books.
NOTE: See
below for a coupon code for ordering this book and information about finding
Jill at AWP26 in Baltimore.
The Heart
Folds Early is a memoir
about what it means to make a choice.
River Teeth editor Jill Christman’s fourth book of
nonfiction, The Heart Folds Early, is about what it means to make a
choice. Loving, rageful, and often funny, Christman's new memoir centers her
decision to end a half-term pregnancy when a routine ultrasound reveals her
baby has just half a heart—and asks: As mothers, how do we carry life and death
in our bodies and survive with our hearts intact?
What boundaries did you break in the writing of this
memoir? Where does that sort of courage come from?
As a writer, I am a contrarian. In grad school, they told me
No dead grandmothers. But I couldn’t help it. In my first memoir, Darkroom:
A Family Exposure, I wrote the hell out of my dying grandmother
(Beatrice Coe Ingraham, school librarian and ace poker player, may she rest in
peace). Later, I learned that using multiple points of view in a memoir is bad
form, but again, sometimes I feel as if I’m looking at my younger self from
somewhere near the ceiling or perhaps I need to issue instructions or establish
myself as part of a community. Third
person, first person direct address, second person (sparingly), first person
plural. . . I use them all. Why have tools if we’re going to leave them in the
box? And now you’re telling me there’s a fourth wall between the narrator and
the reader? Crash through that wall like the Kool Aid Man. (I mean, when it
suits you. Or you’re thirsty for some Red Dye 40.) So, yeah, both in terms of
subject and craft, the breaking of rules is so much a part of my daily practice
that it doesn’t even feel rebellious anymore—which is kind of too bad, you
know?
Now, this book
had to break that Big Boundary—the boundary that tells us we’re not supposed to
talk about a thing. The boundary that shames and scares and shushes us into
silence. This book is about my choice to have a second-trimester medical
abortion.
This is my third
memoir, written through a nearly twenty-year gestation, a time that ran
parallel to me both raising a couple of kids with my poet husband (and, therefore,
working in short, frequently interrupted bursts) and falling in love with the
essay. So
The Heart
Folds Early started as a
memoir (called Mothercraft), split off into essays, spawned a whole
separate e-book (Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood) and
several essays that ran away from the book and eventually got together with other
essays to form a collection (If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in
Essays)—all the while growing and shrinking and changing not only outfits
but whole forms, shapeshifting between nonfiction classifications and
structures like a love child of Proteus and Methis (I’m making this up: they
didn’t hook up, even in myth, but just imagine!).
After an initial agent
pitch to publishers came back with the news that the subject of dying babies is
too depressing, and thus, hard to sell, I read my by that point teenage manuscript
a story and put her to bed (or maybe it was the other way around, but in any
case, I was done). Maybe, I thought, this was not a book I needed to
write. Maybe, I thought, this was a book I had written for myself, and
honestly, that’s a pretty good way to live, no writing is ever wasted, and I
would move on and write other essays and books and let this one rest in a giant
file that was, back then, named Blue Baby Blue.
But then
something big happened. Something terrible. Something world rattling. In June
of 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, and now, now, I had a new
urgent question, didn’t I? What the actual fuck? And so I rewrote the
whole book, beginning with a prologue (in which it’s quite possible I curse too
much), the moment in an Airbnb in Colorado when I heard the news we’d all known
was coming, but now, now, here it was—the news that the right to an abortion in
the United States was no longer protected. Spewing from the rageful volcano
that was by then a perimenopausal me, The Heart Folds Early took on her
final shape.
The book coming
out this March from Nebraska is now quite solidly memoir, and even more or less
chronological—except for that starting at the end to go back to the beginning
bit, and some detours into my youth. One early reader called it a romance.
Sexy. Another said she laughed in every chapter, even though she wasn’t sure
she should be laughing. Writer and activist Sonya Huber said I had “steel
nerves”—so that was something. Steel nerves! Me!
Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s
road to publication.
I cheated and
started answering this question above. (Do you see what I mean about me? I
can’t even follow the clear rules of a good interview question.) So you know
there was the low of being told that my story was too depressing and wouldn’t
sell well as a baby-shower gift (that was an actual thing a marketing
department shared by way of telling my then-agent they were taking a pass). And
because the book is coming out with the amazing people at the University of
Nebraska Press, in the American Lives series, an extraordinary team I’ve worked
with before and knew I could trust with this book, well, that’s the actual publication
high.
But if I could
point to one thing that scared me enough to become a low until I really faced
the scariness was how much I worried about the story being received,
specifically by other parents who had faced the same diagnosis (or one like it),
mid-term, and made a different choice. I deeply and truly respect these many
choices. All of them. With love. So one thing that was really different for me—and
hard—in making The Heart Folds Early was how conscious I needed to be of
my audience in that final two-year rewrite. I was no longer writing the book
for me. I was writing about my choice because I understood it was my
responsibility to tell the story of my second-trimester abortion. I had the
skills to tell my story and the resources to get that story out into the world.
(Speaking of boundaries, we cannot let the parameters of the conversation
around reproductive rights be defined by those who would—and have—stripped us
of those rights. We cannot let these conversations—or any of the big
things we’re wrestling with right now in this country—be over-simplified
because they’re hard.)
So I was
hyper-aware of my many audiences—both actual people I knew or knew of, and
whole categories of people—like young people in the United States coming of age
in a time when their right to an abortion is not protected. I am always aware
that I am writing to my children—perhaps in a time when I will no longer be here.
And, as I said, I was aware that I was writing to other parents, mothers and
fathers, who had faced the same diagnosis we faced and made a different choice.
I wanted to write a book that respected all choices—except, I suppose,
the choice to take away somebody else’s choice. As I write this, I realize that
another high of this book’s path to publication was figuring out how to tell
this story out of love—and not from a place of fear.
What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?
Shew! Great question. I edit two magazines—River Teeth: A
Journal of Nonfiction Narrative—and our (free!) weekly online magazine of
micro-essays, Beautiful Things—and I’ve been teaching and writing
nonfiction for thirty years, so let me tell you, I’m full of advice, most of
which I footnote with—Or maybe not. Maybe you have a reason to do something
else here. So let me try to offer some advice that doesn’t need that
footnote. I’ll choose three:
- Remember that you are not the only one. Not even today. Not even this minute.
- When you’re working on something difficult? Stay. Don’t leave. Linger in the uncertainty. Slow down when it gets hard.
- But keep going. You’re doing it. Keep going.
My favorite writing advice is “write until something
surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?
Ah! Yes. There’s more advice that doesn’t need a footnote.
I’m here for the surprises. On a macro-level, I was surprised by how a
book could grow from such hot rage and deep love—at the same time, on the same
pages. On a micro-level, so many, but one I sometimes point to is on page 23 of
The Heart Folds Early, in a moment where the writing-me returns on
Google maps to look down on the intersection where, many, many years earlier,
my then-fiancé was killed in a horrible crash along with two of his buddies on
the way to get a pizza after work—the jolt of surprise and sadness I felt in my
heart from my couch in Indiana, a lifetime away: “Before I was a mother, I
never thought about this detail of the tragedy, but now? It makes me so sad to
know they died hungry.”
What’s something about your book that you want readers to
know?
As a serial memoirist and someone who’s been teaching
creative nonfiction writing for over half my life, there’s a question I hear a
lot: How long do I have to wait before I write about [insert hard thing
here]. And my answer is always some version of the advice I give for all
writing-advice questions: Only you know how long you need to wait. What do
you think? But for this one, I usually add that the standard advice that we
need to fully process a difficult experience before we write about it has never
made sense to me. Isn’t writing how we come to understand the hard
things in the world that don’t make sense? We can write the hard thing right
away and then three months later and then a decade after that—and each time we
put pen to paper from a different perspective, something new will emerge. Last
spring, the wise and wonderful essayist Steven Harvey (aka, The Humble
Essayist) visited my graduate writing class and when we asked him why he
writes, why he’s still writing, he answered: “I write to compensate for
losses.”
And the losses keep coming, don’t they? But when we write
them, when we write into and through them, we can find something like hope—for
ourselves, for our children, for each other, and maybe, you know, for the
world.
Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any
food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)
I love this question—because I love food. Oh gosh. I’m
trying to think. I ate a lot of clementines during my first pregnancy—and
consumed many avocados during the writing of the book. They’re in there, along
with a fair amount of kid food. And cookies. In life, I’m a baker—sourdough
baguettes and (vegan) banana bread (my daughter is deathly allergic to
eggs)—even before the pandemic made us do it—so those are foods that supported The
Heart Folds Early. My go-to easy, food-processor (gasp!) baguette
recipe is Mark Bittman’s “Easiest and Best French Bread” and the queen of all
banana bread recipes was developed by those vegan geniuses, Isa Chandra
Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero, in Veganomicon: I always double the
recipe, add Penzey’s double-strength vanilla and half again the amount of
spice, and bake one standard loaf pan and one pan of those cute mini-loaves for
my kids’ dorm freezers. Sometimes it’s hard to make it to breakfast before
class! (I can’t find the version from the cookbook online, and it’s always good
to point folks towards Post Punk Kitchen, so here’s a recipe for Isa’s Marbled Banana
Bread—which is basically the same except, you know, for the chocolate; if
you’re not in the mood for marbling, just make this one, but omit the boiling
water and chocolate, and add 1/3 c molasses and a 1/3 cup-ish applesauce:
moist, fruity perfection.)
***
READ MORE ABOUT
THIS AUTHOR: www.jillchristman.com
READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496246790/the-heart-folds-early/
ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR TBR STACK: https://jillchristman.com/2025/12/19/the-heart-folds-early-a-memoir/ (with 40% off coupon code)
READ AN ESSAY RELATED TO THIS BOOK, “The Sloth”: https://brevitymag.com/nonfiction/the-sloth/
BONUS: If you’ll be in Baltimore for AWP in March, visit
Jill a panel, offsite event, or the River Teeth booth #551: https://jillchristman.com/news/
