Book Birthdays celebrate one year of a book’s life in tweets, reviews, and more. This month we’re saying Happy First Book Birthday to If This Were Fiction (Nebraska, September 2022) by Jill Christman.
About the Book:
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. 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.
A Word from the Author:
One year ago, after a sixteen-year gestation, my first collection of essays If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays, emerged from the wonderful American Lives Series, midwifed into this world by my fantastic editor, Courtney Ochsner, and the whole, extraordinary book-birthing team at the University of Nebraska Press. Any celebration of If This Were Fiction begins with a celebration of UNP. Thank you for your vision, skills, and stewardship. Look what we made!
What to say about ITWF’s first year? It was a wild ride. A joyful wild ride. The best part of launching a new book is the opportunity to have conversations about writing and reading with the best book people I know—and an excuse (nay, a virtual mandate!) to meet new book people. Although I’m most comfortable in a room by myself with a notebook or a keyboard, I’m grateful for the book-release nudge of papery courage. Even so, I write better than I talk, and truly, even now, a full year in, please don’t catch me by surprise (I am always surprised) and ask me for the elevator pitch. It changes every day.
If This Were Fiction (spoiler: it’s not) is a collection of essays written over the course of sixteen years during which I gestated both babies and books. It’s about all the things. Listen. I was the only girl child in a pack of boys on a salty island off the coast of Massachusetts. Then that wasn’t wild enough for my mom. She wanted more space, something more beautiful. So, when I was a teenager we moved to a marijuana growing community on a mountain in northeastern Washington. I road my horse Moona to a one-room schoolhouse. If This Were Fiction is what happened when that scrappy kid turned confused teen turned grown-up, paying-attention writer, teacher, wife—and mother. Given what I’d seen and survived, what I knew, how would I be anyone’s mother?
Readers often remark on how funny ITWF can be. These essays travel freely, from the dark into the light—and back again. Roundtrip tickets are still a thing, and these eighteen essays try hard to remember where they’ve been. There is much crying, but also laughter. Mistakes are made. Triumphs are, well, triumphant. The subtitle does more than sit still and look pretty. If This Were Fiction is indeed a love story: for my fiancé who was killed in a car accident when he was just twenty-two, for my handsome poet husband, for our teenaged children, for the baby we lost, for the little girl I was on that island, the teenager reading Steinbeck on horseback, the woman I have become—and, in the end, for the world. (Here, I think of A. Papatya Bucak’s “Studies for a Drawing in Red,” an essay that lives in my brain with me: “How can I convince you, that despite its everything, I love the world?”)
Book marketing is not my métier, but I got myself out there. I designed sweet little book-cover business cards (I love anything that’s a tiny version of something big) and had them printed up. I found self-adhesive googly eyes just the exact size of the ones on the cover of ITWF—and purchased a bag of five hundred. I bought some stretchy wide-legged black pants in a fine fabric from Garnet Hill. I was ready. (Seriously, if you want to order a signed copy with real googly eyes or have me zoom into your writing class or book club, hit me up.)
ITWF & I traveled by plane, train, automobile, and electromagnetic radiation all around the country—from Notre Dame to New Orleans, Carbondale to Seattle, Madison to Austin, and on and on. I did readings and/or sat on panels and/or ate lunch at the Texas Chili Parlor with some of my new University of Nebraska Press sisters including Sonya Huber, Jody Keisner, and Suzanne Ohlmann. Next month, I’ll be a featured reader at the 2023 LitYoungstown Fall Literary Festival with Alison Stine and Ross Gay—and what part of that is not a delight and a joy?
If This Were Fiction is a toddler now, finding balance, learning to run, browsing bookstores. She has a cool sticker—a shiny Silver from the 2022 Foreword INDIES Autobiography & Memoir Awards—and she’s a finalist in the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Award. It makes me so happy to know ITWF has been chosen by the good people who put books in readers’ hands every day—and as I celebrate ITWF’s first full year in the world, I’m sending out bottomless gratitude to every single reader and reviewer who has held my big-eyed birthday book in their hands. Be gentle with your beautiful selves—and thank you.
Reviews:
“Perhaps the googly eyes already tipped you off, but despite Christman’s experiences with trauma and grief, plenty of joy, wonder, and hilarious humiliation abound. . . . If This Were Fiction sits on my desk as I write this, its pages forever bent open from my frequent returns.”
—The Rumpus (reviewed by Brooke Champagne)
“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
“The essays are funny and sweet, tragic and wise, but all are composed of parts so necessary that you may find yourself coming to the end and wondering if you even read it, or if it was a dream from your own mind.” – Brevity
“In ‘Spinning,’ as in the book altogether, Christman writes herself into a protagonist who is—like her prose—both brave and generous. This Christman knows the world is rife with risk, but she chooses a path and strides off into the distance anyway. – Barrelhouse
“Above all, readers will see in this book how love is investigated, embraced, and exuded through Christman’s grief, trauma, marriage, and parenting.” – Literary Mama
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