Since 2010, in various publications, I’ve interviewed authors—mostly memoirists—about aspects of writing and publishing. Initially I did this for my own edification, as someone who was struggling to find the courage and support to write and publish my memoir. I’m still curious about other authors’ experiences, and I know many of you are, too. So, inspired by the popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire, I’ve launched The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire.
Here’s the 203rd installment, featuring Jill Christman, editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, and author, most recently, of The Heart Folds Early: A Memoir. - Sari Botton
P.S. Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.
Jill Christman is the author of The Heart Folds Early: A Memoir (releasing March 1, 2026 from the University of Nebraska Press). Christman’s other books include If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays (2023 Foreword INDIES Silver Winner), Darkroom: A Family Exposure (winner of AWP Prize for CNF), and Borrowed Babies: Apprenticing for Motherhood (excerpted in Longreads and the inspiration for a play by the same name). Her essays have appeared in many anthologies and in magazines such as Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Iron Horse Literary Review, and O, The Oprah Magazine. A 2020 NEA Literature Fellow, she teaches at Ball State University and serves as editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative and Beautiful Things (a free weekly online magazine of micro nonfiction). Visit her at jillchristman.com
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How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?
I’m 56. I wrote my first short story by honest-to-god lamplight in 1983. I was 14 years old, living off the grid in the mountains of northeastern Washington state, and riding my horse Moona through the snow to the one-room schoolhouse I attended. You could say I came to writing under the strong influence of John Steinbeck. Also, in the winter up there, it got dark at around four in the afternoon, so I had a lot of time on my hands in the evenings.
What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?
The Heart Folds Early: A Memoir came out in the University of Nebraska Press American Lives Series on March 1, 2026.
The book centers a specific life experience: my choice to have a second-trimester abortion in 2006 when the baby I was carrying was diagnosed with a heart condition that was “incompatible with life”.
What number book is this for you?
Fourth book, third memoir.
How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?
Memoir—because it centers a specific life experience: my choice to have a second-trimester abortion in 2006 when the baby I was carrying was diagnosed with a heart condition that was “incompatible with life,” and you know, is about events in my own life, told by me, as true as I could make it, built in chapters, weighing in at just under 300 pages. So it’s really checking those straight-up memoir boxes.
This book had a twenty-year gestation, a time that ran parallel to me both raising a couple of kids with my poet husband (and, thus, working in short, frequently interrupted bursts), and figuring out (oh good fortune!) that I think in essays, which is to say those unanswerable questions about the human experience braided up with images and stories born from my daily attempts to stay present and curious and pay attention in this world—even, or especially, when things get ugly.
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 (making this up: they didn’t hook up, even in myth, but just imagine!). After an initial 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 now teenaged-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 at that point called 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, oh, 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!
One thing that’s really different for me in The Heart Folds Early is how conscious I was 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. We cannot let the boundaries and 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 be dumbed down and 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 am no longer here. 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.
What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?
(There has never been a writer who is worse at elevator pitches that I am—and I believe I have provided ample evidence for that elsewhere in this interview. But anyway—here are two different versions. I usually go with the first.)
The Heart Folds Early is about what it means to make a choice.
Or, if I’m feeling more out of body and third person:
River Teeth editor Jill Christman’s fourth book of nonfiction 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’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?
Like most writers, my origin story is in reading. As a kid, my solace and my friends lived in fiction. I was never happier than when I was in a corner with a book and I filled by bag at the library every week with a delicious feeling of wonder that still hasn’t faded (how could this be free? this bounty?)—The Black Stallion, Pippi Longstocking, Little Women, Little House in the Big Woods, A Wrinkle in Time, Anne of Green Gables, The Hobbit. . . and when I landed on a remote mountain when I was thirteen with no tv (or indoor plumbing, for that matter), that’s when I read everything on the shelf in the cabin (from Larry McMurtry to Jean Auel, a little Herman Hesse to really confuse me, and so much Steinbeck)—and writing. In college at the University of Oregon in the late eighties, I’d chosen what I thought was the more practical major of journalism, but I’d pictured myself bouncing across exotic landscapes with my (imaginary) photographer boyfriend writing longform pieces for National Geographic, but instead what I got was lecture classes with so much focus on the inverted triangle that I wanted to gauge my own eyes out with a pencil. I recognize now that my fantasy of journalism was the beginning of my pull towards creative nonfiction, but I didn’t have language (or teachers) for that yet.
And then, in my sophomore year of college, my fiancé, Colin, was killed in a car accident with his buddies on the way to get a pizza after work. Just like that (crash, gone). I withdrew from all my classes and traveled around Central America for a few months, using the daily focus of finding food and shelter to hold me in my body, and when I returned (with a stack of the blue lab notebooks filled with a record of my journey), I moved over to the English Department. If my life could end in an instant, I figured I might as well read as much as possible in the interim.
That’s where I found teachers who opened my world to include both Shakespeare and the Black women writers whose language and stories helped to lead me back out into the light. Can I say this? And Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Terry McMillan, and Toni Morrison all said yes.
How did this book come to be? The nuts-and-bolts two decades of writing is elsewhere in this interview, but the truest answer? This book came to be because the writers who came before me demonstrated what was possible. These women showed me that I could walk into the darkest of rooms and turn on a light. These women taught me that not only was this work possible, but if I have the power, it is also my job to tell my story. So when I’d reached a point where talking honestly about my choice felt to hard and scary, I pulled myself together, and I did the work.
What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?
Throughout my writing life, I’ve taken on tough material—childhood sexual abuse, addiction, disordered eating, rape, Colin’s death—and as a teacher I preached (and believe) that I’d never met a secret that did anyone any good. That telling our stories clearly might just save us, and maybe somebody else along the way.
Writing my first memoir, Darkroom, saved my life. I believed in that possibility when I began working on that first iteration of what is now The Heart Folds Early twenty years ago—I believe this now—and the story of choosing to end the developing life of a baby boy I was already in love with made me feel vulnerable in a new, and nearly silencing, way. How would I tell the story in a way that stayed rooted in the personal without going on the defense? How could I share what it felt to make a choice to end his life out of love for him? Out of our need—and yes, my husband Mark was part of this conversation even as, yes, we both knew that the final decision was mine to hold and carry—to protect our son from the terrible suffering that would be his if we let the pregnancy continue?
Going—again—against my own advice to write like you’re the only one in the room, I thought hard and often about parents who had made different choices, parents who were possibly, as they held my not-yet-written book in their hands, were also holding a baby who was, on that night, looking too blue, satting in the high 60s after another surgery. Or maybe a mother who had chosen to deliver naturally and let her baby die in her arms. Or or or. And at a certain point in the writing, I thought: I don’t have to do this. I can write something else. But after Dobbs, I knew I had to tell this story, my own way, with courage and truth and all the love I could muster.
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.
How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?
As you well know, this is a complicated question, and the answer is, always—It depends. (I highly recommend an anthology edited by Joy Castro called Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family: there’s a fantastic range of takes on this question in that book, and mine boils down to my transition from if folks didn’t want the writer in the family saying they did a thing, well, then they shouldn’t have done it, to recognizing that sometimes we are close to other humans—specifically, our children—who didn’t necessarily sign up to be beloved by and live in such close proximity to a serial memoirist. Becoming a mother changed my clear tell-all-and-name-names stance on this question to a more nuanced one that thinks carefully about whose story a particular story is to tell and the significant difference between secrets—and privacy.
When my children reached what I called the “age of reason” (somewhere around ten years old), I started giving them rights of refusal: I could either describe what I was writing, or they were welcome to read it, and if they didn’t want me to try to publish whatever it was, I simply wouldn’t, or I would edit out the part they didn’t want; for example, my longform essay Falling was in a drawer for a while because our son didn’t think he wanted to world to know about the day with the tree, which I am only telling you here because he changed his mind and that essay was published. I have written very little about my kids as teenagers, for example, because those years are theirs to tell.
In The Heart Folds Early, I use real names for my immediate family—because I just have the one husband, daughter, and living son, right? And my mom is my mom. There’s no use pretending. For past boyfriends, I leaned into mercy and used initials of pseudonyms. Ditto for health care professionals—obviously, I was not going to offer up the name of the doctor who performed the abortion. What I did not do was create any composite characters or disguise details: I’m not sure I’d know how to do that even if I wanted to, and I’ve never wanted to because, for me, the most valuable thing about writing nonfiction is digging into the truth—even as we all know that memory is fundamentally fallible—even, or especially, when that truth gets sticky or tricky or just plain inconvenient.
One piece of advice I give to my students is to take advantage of the precious time that is a writing program to find your best readers—for you—and bind them to you in a mutually beneficial lifelong beta reader relationship. That’s what I did, but happily, my best reader was also charming, hot, dog-loving, and could quote poetry directly into my ear—so I just went ahead and married him—which was an extreme version of my find-your-readers advice, but it really worked out for me. In most cases, Mark is my first and only reader, and he is one hell of an editor. Sometimes he’ll just write in the margins: No. And when he’s says something is beautiful or true, I know I can believe him.
I do make changes if family members request them—but this is quite rare—and if it’s a matter of us remembering something different, I typically leave both versions in the text. I do a lot of fairly meta memory wrestling right there for the reader to see.
Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)
I’ve taken inspiration in ways big (I can say that?) and small (I can mix up the point of view in memoir or talk directly to my reader or write a sentence with lots of conjunctions and no commas?) from every book I’ve ever read or reread, but specifically for The Heart Folds Early, I’d point to these nonfiction books that navigate loss and love in complex and beautiful ways (in no particular order): Lauren Slater’s Love Works Like This, Steven Harvey’s The Book of Knowledge and Wonder, Beverly Lowry’s Crossed Over: A Murder, a Memoir, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water (the teacher who disses her work was my across-the-fence-honest-to-god neighbor when I lived in Eugene as an undergraduate), Elizabeth Alexander’s The Light of the World, Abigail Thomas’s Safekeeping: Some Stories from a Life, Catherine Newman’s Waiting for Birdy, Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?, Elizabeth McCracken’s An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, and as has been true for every memoir I’ve written: Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?
You have to look hard, go deep, and allow yourself to move beyond what you thought you knew. Healing is a process of discovery. So is writing about difficult material. This is not so much about courage as it is about finding the path or the vehicle that will help you carry the story you’ve been bearing alone.
Speaking of solitude—and I get that this goes against what I said was true for me in the writing of this book: Let yourself pretend you’re writing only for yourself. Nobody else has to see it. Believe this. As a wise woman by the name of Cheryl Strayed once said: There’s not a direct line from your laptop to the editorial desk of The New Yorker. Believe this and write on.
When you’re writing something difficult, don’t leave. Stay. Linger in the uncertainty. Slow down when it gets hard.
You are not the only one. You’re not even the only one today. This perspective is both accurate—and liberating.
What do you love about writing?
Oh gosh. I love just being in it, you know? I love when I’m in that flow state that comes when I’m in a daily practice of writing, following the images, letting language beget language, and—Whoa! What?!—I find something I didn’t know was there. Those moments of discovery still feel like magic to me. I love what we writers can do with time in writing, all that wonderful magic-carpet folding. Honestly, this is my favorite thing about getting older: I have so much time to work with. Glorious.
What frustrates you about writing?
Sometimes, when I’m not accessing my most zen, it’s-about-the-process self, I’ll be frustrated by the fact that even thirty years into memoir writing, I can’t be more, you know, efficient. I have to make such a royal mess to make anything at all—and on my best days, I know in my brain and heart that that’s the whole point. As my father, Pete Christman—whose art we know use on the cover of River Teeth—used to tell his students and offspring: “Fail early, fail often” and “Make art every day.” I know he was right, but the to-do-list-planner in me (and she is a force, let me tell you) sometimes forgets.
Also, I can find the publishing world frustrating (for example, the first time I tried to find a publisher for an earlier iteration of the book, I was told by an editor that “motherhood has been played out”: say what again?!), but again, I just need to remind myself to keep the writing of books and the publishing of them separate. Because they are.
(And also? I highly recommend looking beyond the fantasy of the six-figure advance with one of the Big Five: Chances of hitting that exist, of course, but they’re slim, and maybe not even what you most need/want from your writing and your life. So many of us have flirted with that fantasy, and I certainly was not immune. Publishing an essay collection with the wonderful people at the University of Nebraska Press snapped me out of that, and here’s why: I used to come out of conversations with agents and big publishers feeling wretched, and I recognized that working with Nebraska made me happy. I feel like I’m part of a team that cares about literature and that feels so good.
What about writing surprises you?
Language surprises me. Every day. Also, I am consistently surprised by surprise. When I pay attention and stay curious, when I show up and do the work, when I slow down and really look, wow, there’s always something new to see or feel or know or ask.
Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine, or writing at specific times?
I’m a morning writer—the darker and quieter, the better. In my life as a teacher-editor-mom writer, it’s not always possible to write before I open the doors (both actual and digital) and let other people and needs come streaming into my creative space, but when I can carve out that early-morning time? That’s the sweet spot. Depending on whether I’m generating or revising, I might set a goal of either time (an hour or two—again, depending) or word count (500 or 1,000). The older I get, the more writing feels like a practice to me. A time I treasure and look forward to: I mean, my goodness, how lucky is a life reading and writing?
How did this book come to be? The nuts-and-bolts two decades of writing is elsewhere in this interview, but the truest answer? This book came to be because the writers who came before me demonstrated what was possible. These women showed me that I could walk into the darkest of rooms and turn on a light. These women taught me that not only was this work possible, but if I have the power, it is also my job to tell my story.
Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?
When I was writing my first memoir in grad school—in a fiction program because in 1995, there was, I believe, just the one nonfiction MFA at Iowa and I certainly didn’t know about it—I spent mornings writing and afternoons throwing pots on the wheel. Something about the spinning and the pressure on my palms and the feeling of the clay centering on the wheel and then changing shapes, pulling upward, felt like the other half of writing to me—the part where I broke whatever was blocking memory or feelings and made space for the words to come in.
[Cut?] These days? Well, I’ve always wanted to learn to play the piano, and when our son went off to college last fall, and we started free-birding as we call it, I signed up for lessons with a student from my university’s piano pedagogy program. I was given the option to skip the holiday recital, but when I told my husband I was planning to take a pass, he said, “Oh, you’re playing in the recital!” And I did. So it was me and mostly little kids in sweet, shining shoes. I played “Jingle Bells.” Was it terrifying? Yes. Did I mess up? You bet. Did it matter? Nope. When I’m practicing every evening, I have to concentrate fully on where my fingers are going next. There’s no room in my brain to think about anything else—and that is beautiful. [End Cut]
What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?
This is going to seem off-brand, but I’m going to say it out loud and see how that feels. I’m going back to my roots, all the way back, and working on a YA novel (set in the 80s, so “historical,” I’m told) about a teenager looking for love on a mountain in the Pacific Northwest. And, yes, of course, there will be horses—and Bigfoot.
Thanks so much for this, Sari. It was an honor to spend time with your questions. (Ed note: Thank YOU!)
"I’d never met a secret that did anyone any good. That telling our stories clearly might just save us, and maybe somebody else along the way." This...is why I keep coming back to you and your writing. Thanks for these deeply insightful answers, Jill, and for the questions, Sari!
So great! Thanks so much!