Invite Everyone into the Room: An Interview with Jill Christman

When Jill Christman was twenty weeks pregnant, she learned her growing son (affectionately known as “Baby Brother” by her family) had developed only half a heart. Her painful, compassionate decision to terminate the pregnancy is at the center of her stunning new memoir, The Heart Folds Early, an unforgettable chronicle of grief and love and choice. Christman, whose previous memoirs include If This Were Fiction: A Love Story, and Darkroom: A Family Exposure, brings tremendous nuance to the conversation about reproductive rights, plunging readers into the lived experience of choice, reminding us that “choosing in theory is not really choosing. Choosing in the abstract is thinking, judging, maybe even imagining, and not terrible as a mind exercise, but that is all this if-I-were choosing can ever be: a mind exercise. Unless you’re a woman who has made this choice, yes or no,” Christman writes, “you cannot understand. I beg you to stop pretending you can.” Christman explores other devastating stories in this book, including the loss of her fiancé at nineteen, and her experience of childhood sexual abuse, yet she brings so much light to the page, so much refreshing candor and humor, that The Heart Folds Early is ultimately a deeply inspiring read, a story filled to the brim with love. I’m so grateful to have had the chance to speak with Jill Christman about this gorgeous, moving book and her journey with it.

Gayle Brandeis

You open The Heart Folds Early with people asking, “What is the new book about?” I’m curious if your own thoughts around the “aboutness” of the book have changed since you finished writing it.

Jill Christman

This is a bit of a trick answer, but since the prologue is the first thing I wrote after returning to the manuscript after Roe was overturned in the summer of 2022, the answer to your good question is no, not really. I was testing my own nerve. Would I be able to tell this story with the clarity and honesty it required? Without hiding behind language? The Heart Folds Early is about grief, love, and fear in many permutations . . . “but—I want to see if I can say it at the beginning and not flinch—at heart center, this book is about abortion. Specifically, it’s about a second-trimester abortion. My own.” I’m guessing this is what you’re getting at with your question: A lot of life happens on either side of our baby’s devastating diagnosis, and the book is really about what it means to make a choice.

Gayle Brandeis

I love how so much of this book is about being a writer, and what the process of writing can offer us. You mention telling audiences that one of your previous books, Darkroom, had saved your life. What gifts did writing this book bring?

Jill Christman

And I love this question! The Heart Folds Early is my third memoir, and completely different from the first two in terms of my relationship to the reader. In nonfiction workshops, I counsel my students to write their hard stuff for themselves. Send everyone else out of the room. Whatever critics, family members, idealized or imagined readers are hanging out inside your brain when you sit down at your writing desk, shoo them away.

But THFE is different. I started writing parts of this memoir nearly twenty years ago, and three years before the book you hold in your hands, I put it away. My then-agent had sent an earlier version around and what we heard back was that the marketing teams didn’t know what to do with a book about second-trimester abortion. Nobody wants to hear about dying babies—and they certainly wouldn’t be able to pitch it as a baby shower gift. Too depressing. So when I returned to the manuscript, determined to be part of a more human and nuanced conversation around reproductive rights, I invited everyone into the writing room with me. I crashed through that fourth wall like the Kool-Aid Man on a sticky summer day. Throughout, I speak to all readers, but occasionally directly address everyone from old boyfriends and former teachers to other parents who’ve made different choices when faced with similar diagnoses to my own grown children, perhaps in a future where I am no longer here. At the end of the day, everything I write is for my kids.

So The Heart Folds Early gave me the gift of deepening my understanding of a great loss in my life over decades and the experience of throwing wide the doors and inviting everyone in. Also, because I explore the idea of how we carry our beloveds with us, alive and dead, I followed that thread to the science about microchimerism that tells us that fetal cells cross the placenta during pregnancy—and thus, I not only carry all my babies, here and gone, metaphorically, but biologically as well. They are written in my cells. It is a gift to know what I have always felt to be true.

Gayle Brandeis

Speaking of writing, you’re married to a writer (and note, “I love that our origin story has poetry.”) Do you share work in process with one another or wait until you have a full draft? Has he also written about the loss of Baby Brother?

Jill Christman

Yes, as the juicy bits near the beginning of the book reveal, I met my husband, Mark Neely, in the magnolia-scented heat of Tuscaloosa when we were both in the MFA program at the University of Alabama in the late nineties. 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.

We’re that unicorn of a literary couple inhabiting two tenured jobs in the same creative writing program—at Ball State University—and now we also co-edit River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, so yes, we trade work, but typically later in the process (because neither of us wants to squander the other’s precious reading time). We always read each other’s books before they leave the house. And, also yes, Mark has written about Baby Brother, too—not in nonfiction, but in poems like “Unborn Elegy” in Ticker (“It’s strange/how Bruce misses him,/this boy he’s never met/except as a kick in Annie’s belly . . .”) or “Odds” in Dirty Bomb (“Our child, you said,/and a crooked haircut/came into my mind and his/face: one inexplicable bud/at odds with everything.”).

Gayle Brandeis

Your voice is so alive, it vibrates off the page—funny, aching, angry, curious, bereft, loving. Was the mix of humor and pain intentional in this work, or did it emerge as you wrote?

Jill Christman

First: thank you. That’s very kind. Humor emerges as I write, and on the page as in life, I let the humor stay. Over the years, a critique of my nonfiction has been something along the lines of “Christman is surprisingly funny” or “often quite funny”: I think readers are responding to the surprise of the humor couched among subjects like rape, accidental death, abortion, disordered eating, etcetera. One thing I tell my students is to “revise toward the strange”—so I can say that when trauma and humor join hands, I never revise away from that humor. I always welcome her to the party. My feeling as a writer and human: When you can laugh? Laugh. This is how we survive. Laughter is how we resist.

Also, I love language. I have fun with language. Sometimes that play results in something funny, and of course, the people in our lives bring the humor. My husband Mark often gets to deliver the funniest lines, and our daughter Ella, who was three when the baby died, brings the sweetness. We have a lot of laughter in our house, and I don’t hold that back from the page.

Think of a jester—the fool in Shakespearean drama is often funny, but also the one who can tell the truth. The jester can say things—even when it’s dangerous to do so. That’s us, right? I also think it’s important to realize that letting in a crack of light through humor lets us go (with our reader) to deeper places: mirth is a thing we feel deeply when we can also feel pain deeply—there has to be room in there.

Gayle Brandeis

You mention a lot of teachers who have been important throughout your life, and share fun windows into your own teaching process. Could you speak a bit about both how your own teaching has been informed by the teachers in your life and how your teaching impacted the writing of this book?

Jill Christman

Oh, wow. Great question. Teachers and teaching are everywhere in The Heart Folds Early, and just now I’m realizing that here is something else we take into our bodies and carry with us—the good teachers who have taught us. In the acknowledgment section, I have a whole paragraph to the teachers who helped make this book, who helped make me, and through these teachers, I can track my development as a writer, teacher, and human. Mr. Cosmos, my fifth-grade science teacher who taught me to really look. Diane, my ninth-grade teacher of everything; for real, I rode my horse to a one-room schoolhouse on a remote mountain in Washington state and Diane was the one teacher—for all thirteen of us. Diane introduced me to Steinbeck. She also handed back my first terrible story unmarked and told me to try harder—and then she’d read it carefully. Miss Chase, my high school English teacher my senior year, taught me to be humble when I thought I was too good for detention and then saved my fool ass by giving me a place to live that summer after high school when it didn’t work out with my boyfriend. She cleared the road for me to get out of town and onward to the rest of my lucky life. Sometimes people say, “My high school English teacher saved my life.” Mine really did. And she was first in line to read this book, too. At the University of Oregon, Dr. Monza Naff—whom I only later understood was contract faculty and thus overworked, underpaid, and totally bringing it to her classroom every day, introduced me to Toni Cade Bambara, Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison. First, she cracked my mind open and then she taught me what it feels like to really open my throat and use my voice. I needed that when I was writing this book. Dr. Jennifer Freyd, my first and forever mentor, showed me (and also, you know, the world) what it means to live courageously. And then I made it all the way down to Tuscaloosa, an MFA program, and the inimitable Sandy Huss, who took it upon herself to challenge me to ask harder questions, pursue deeper truths, and write better sentences. When I thought maybe I couldn’t do it, she wrote in my margins: Keep going, Jilly. I live with her voice in my head. When I say to my students, “Before the manuscript there was silence. The manuscript breaks the silence. Why here? Why now?” that’s not me, that’s Sandy. That’s Sandy in me—and onward we go.

At every stage of my life—from elementary school all the way through to my graduate program (hold on: except for . . . middle school?!)—there’s been a teacher who has believed in me far beyond my capacity at each stage of development to believe in myself. I try to do that for my students. These teachers cared about me as a person—a flawed, fumbling, perfect, growing human being. Through them I learned to write and live with close attention, curiosity, and love. And every day I’m in a classroom I try to pay that forward. I hope my students see that. I hope my students see me seeing them. I know they’re watching—and so when I returned to finish this book in 2022, writing and revising every day, my students were among the readers I was writing to with all my might. I wanted them to know how hard I was trying to say something true. And then I want them to do the same—and so on and so on forever and ever.

Gayle Brandeis

Your use of metaphor is amazing. “Grief was a fog. Grief was a deep well. Grief was concrete shoes. Grief was sticky, a clear, immobilizing syrup. Grief was a thick plate of bulletproof glass like the kind they put up between us and the gorillas at the zoo, the one the alpha male gazes through placidly or throws his body against in a fit of caged frustration.” I mean, wowza! Could you talk a bit about your use of metaphor? Do you have a favorite metaphor in this book?

Jill Christman

I’m blushing like a Luxardo cherry hiding shyly in the crystal pool of a chilly Manhattan over here, Gayle. Seriously though, I love playing with metaphor. So often it’s metaphor that surprises us when we’re writing, isn’t it? We’re playing with our words and then—oh!—we discover something more true in something else. I’m not sure I know how to choose a favorite, but years ago, I wrote an essay about stepping into an outdoor shower in the rainforest on the eastern side of Costa Rica just a few months after Colin was killed—in the essay I’m standing still, bracing my sad self against the rough wooden walls of the shower, when I hear a noise, look up, and see my first sloth on a cecropia branch just above me. He was right there. He was moving, but he was moving so incredibly slowly. Reaching for the next branch, my new sloth friend moved with almost comical slowness, and when I wrote the story of that day, the metaphor came out inverted: That sloth is as slow as grief. And how do I explain it? That metaphor felt like grace. But here’s the thing about writing: We all have wounds we return to again and again on the page. Colin’s sudden death is one of mine. Grief is one of mine.

Grief is never done with us, is it? In the passage you quote, I’m struggling to find a metaphor for grief that holds an even deeper truth, and I can’t for the life of me tell you how I arrived at the bulletproof glass in the zoo—this impermeable barrier between one life and another, between those living on planet grief and the rest of the world—but I kept trying, calling myself on my own bullshit, and that chapter comes back again to the gorilla:

Gayle Brandeis

Of course, language in general is important throughout the book—you even have a sentence that says, simply and potently, “Language matters.” How would you like this book to change the way people talk about abortion and reproductive rights?

Jill Christman

In Toni Morrison’s 1993 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, she said: 

Word-work is sublime . . . because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like no other life.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

I want our conversations about grief to be complex and real. I want our conversations about reproductive rights to be complex and real. I’m sick of letting the bounds of these conversations be drawn for us. We need to let them be messy and muddy and rich or we will never find our way out of these dark woods.

Because I invited everyone into the room when I was writing the book, you can bet the anti-choice language was also there, a graphic billboard looming over the road I was traveling. Abortion stops a beating heart. I heard the arguments leveled against me as I was writing, and I could even imagine the most true version of my story being used against reproductive rights and accessible health care. I worried—a lot—about any words I wrote that might cast judgement on parents who had chosen differently. They had enough pain in their everyday, and I honor their choices. I tried to think myself out of this corner, but this is one place I’m still stuck. Maybe we all are. Writing this book helped me to understand more about my own relationship to reproductive rights. I’m clear that a hypothetical choice is not really a choice. The choices we imagine are not really choices. Only the choices we make are choices—and I believe every human has the right to choose, to make a real choice—except the choice to take away another human’s choice, right?

So the billboard was there when I grieved Baby Brother. When, in the hard, heavy days after the abortion, I turned over the options for a choice I had already made. When I shared that I considered my choice to be our choice—mine and Mark’s together—even as we both understood the final choice was mine. When I spoke what I know to be true: ours was a choice made from love because we could not let our baby suffer. Speaking these truths complicates the narrative in a necessary way.

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.

When our daughter was in kindergarten, her wonderful teacher, Mrs. Huffman, had a regular reminder for the children: “Taste your words.” Taste your words. Language matters.

Gayle Brandeis

In your acknowledgments, you write, “after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the federal constitutional right to abortion, I rewrote the whole book like my skirt was on fire and only the book would put it out before I burned,” and the urgency of the writing comes through so profoundly. Could you talk a bit more about this rewriting experience?

Jill Christman

So The Heart Folds Early had a twenty-year gestation, a time that ran parallel to raising two children with my poet husband (and, thus, working in short, frequently interrupted bursts).

After an initial pitch to publishers around 2018 came back with the news that the subject of dying babies is too depressing and, thus, hard to sell, I read my then-tween 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 f? And so I rewrote the whole book, beginning with that 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—trust me on this one, the heat was real.

I rewrote the whole manuscript from that moment. I was so mad and I felt such responsibility to tell my story. After that, during the two years it took me to rewrite the book, I’d say that it was the writing itself that took care of me. Writing is how I protect myself. Writing is how I give shape to the loss. When I revisit something hard in the act of writing, I am in control of that moment in a way I couldn’t be as those events were unfolding, so I’ve come to understand that rather than feel scary, the act of writing feels safe to me. In writing, I am inside my own power. Writing is how I keep myself whole. And The Heart Folds Early took on her final shape. No writing writes itself, but this was the closest I’ve ever come.

Gayle Brandeis

Is there anything you wish I had asked or anything else you’d like to share about your journey with this book and the impact you’d like it to have?

Jill Christman

I want The Heart Folds Early to reach a hand back—or down or sideways—anywhere someone needs a hand and help to pull them up. Maybe that’s a lot to ask from a book, but that’s what I want.

NONFICTION
The Heart Folds Early
By Jill Christman
University of Nebraska Press
Published March 1, 2026