If This Were Fiction
A Love Story in Essays
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
