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. Her new book The Heart Folds Early: A Memoir (Nebraska, 2026) was published this month.
Holy smokes, March is going to be a big month in this house.
After nearly twenty years in the making, my fourth book of nonfiction—The Heart Folds Early: A Memoir—is now out with the wonderful people at the University of Nebraska Press.
I would like to share Heart’s birth story because it’s a hopeful one—not despite of the long road from conception to publication, but because of that long road. Maybe my story will inspire somebody to keep going. Maybe my story will remind somebody how much our individual stories matter in our big, collective, human story. When the forces that be tell us to quiet down, there’s usually a reason. Scratch that. There’s always a reason. I’ve never met a secret that helped me.
In May 2006, after a routine ultrasound revealed that our baby had just half a heart, a condition we were told was “incompatible with life,” I made a choice. The kind of abortion I had is rare: Just 3% of all abortions in the United States happen between 16 and 20 weeks gestation. The first iteration of this memoir was tough going for me as a writer, partially because I was struggling to find language and shape for a story I didn’t yet understand, and partially because I was afraid. Eventually, around 2018, my then-agent sent the then-manuscript on a round with Big 5 publishers, and the feedback was pretty consistent: beautiful writing (why, thank you), but they didn’t know how to “position” the memoir—and also? “Motherhood has been played out.” The marketing folks worried that a story about a second-trimester medical abortion was “too depressing” and “not the kind of book [they] could sell as a baby shower gift.”
It’s possible that’s why nobody wanted the book in 2018. It’s also possible that I hadn’t yet written the book I needed to write. So I put that manuscript to bed. Not down for a nap. To bed. And, really, I was surprisingly fine with that. Relieved, even. Writing is how I live and living with that manuscript for that first decade after losing the baby we called Baby Brother was vital to me as a mother. Also, as I am always reminding my students, no writing is ever wasted. Does a basketball player regret the hours she spends making shots from the free throw line? Of course not.
So I was moving on. I navigated the pandemic writing other things—essays mostly—and my agent and I amicably parted ways. She was great, but I needed to return to myself as a writer in a daily practice. At a certain point, though, I understood I had an essay collection, and my poet husband, Mark, said, “I’ll be your agent. What’s your dream press?” I laughed, but he was serious. He pressed: “Dream press?” I told him Nebraska, of course, because it was true. He gave me a deadline for my query letter, I sent it off to acquisitions editor Courtney Ochsner per his instructions, and in 2022, If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays came out in the American Lives Series. A dream! Not everybody with a poet for an agent gets so lucky.
But then something else happened. On June 24, 2022, Roe v. Wade was overturned and within hours of hearing the news, I knew that I would return to this book and write it fresh from the beginning. I rewrote the whole book like my skirt was on fire and only the book would put it out before I burned.
And that’s what I did. The path to publication after that was pretty much identical to the path for If This Were Fiction—poet agent and all—except with the additional, necessary comfort that I now knew and deeply trusted the team at the University of Nebraska Press. In November 2024, I sent Courtney another letter with another book manuscript and I said what was true on that day:
I’ve been waiting until after the election to send you what I’m hoping is the final incarnation of my new memoir—and here we are: the day after the 2024 presidential election, a day that also happens to be the twenty-first birthday of my daughter. Hitting send on this message feels like an affirmation that I exist, that the women and girls I love exist and matter, a proclamation that we refuse to be silenced. I am so grateful, Courtney, to know that you are the editor on the other side opening this message. I have been working on this book—on and off—for nearly twenty years, but it’s only in the past couple of post-Dobbs years that I’ve understood the necessity to tell this complex story with the transparency, care, and clarity our conversations around reproductive rights require.
And Courtney and I got to do another book together—a book that is finally here.
Here’s one more cute part to this book birth story—the easy, dreamy part. The when-I-got-to-the-hospital-I-was-already-8-centimeters-dilated-and-by-the-time-they-got-me-to-a-room-it-was-time-to-push part:
Like many of you, I’m guessing, this week I’ll be in Baltimore. The last time I went to Baltimore was exactly 23 years ago—in March of 2003. A newly minted Assistant Professor at Ball State University, I was traveling to AWP—my first!—because my first book, Darkroom: A Family Exposure, a memoir I wrote while I was in the fiction program at the University of Alabama had won the AWP Award Series Prize in Creative Nonfiction and I’d been invited to read from my freshly minted first book at the conference. Do you know how many things I’d published before I sent Darkroom out to the two contests that existed at the time for creative nonfiction book manuscripts? Zero. Do you know that back then we printed out our manuscripts and sent them in generously padded envelopes? Can you imagine my utter shock, about six months after that trip to the post office, when I picked up the phone—a landline, of course—in my little bungalow in south Minneapolis and a voice said, “Jill? This is Barry Sanders. Your new best friend.” Barry was that year’s judge. My first book, the first place I sent it, won. It’s unbelievable. It remains unbelievable. It instilled in me, it should be said, unrealistic and unreal expectations for my future in publishing. Just one push! I barely felt a thing!
And then, and then, two days before I was going to get on a plane with Mark to give that reading from my first book in Baltimore, I peed on a stick. We were trying, but barely. One month of trying. Two lines. So off I went to Baltimore with my first book and the secret of secrets.
A whole lot of life has gone down between my first trip to Baltimore and this one. Twenty-three years later I’m heading back—this time to read from my fourth book, one that spanned nearly two decades in the making and publishing. So many years in transition. And, once again, there will be three of us boarding that plane. That baby I’d been pregnant with for like two minutes when I ran into my writer friend Kate at the hotel bar and we were both ordering sparkling water with lime? Well. That baby is twenty-two, about to graduate from college, and working as an intern at The Kenyon Review. She’ll be helping to staff the booth.
Wild, isn’t it?
I look forward to seeing some of you in Baltimore!
Jill Christman will be signing copies of The Heart Folds Early at UNP’s booth in the Exhibitor’s Hall (1069/1071) on Wednesday, March 5 from 10:30-11:00 a.m. EDT. Find Jill’s full list of events during AWP here.
UNP blog 