The Heart Folds Early

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.

"The Heart Folds Early is a brilliant, breathtaking memoir about the dignity and necessity of our choices, and how everybody bears griefs unforeseen that, at times, hardly seem survivable. Jill Christman writes about the toughest matters of human existence with a directness, empathy, and humor that is the closest thing I'll ever know to love born from a page. I'm so grateful for this book, for this narrator's wisdom, for her heart."--Brooke Champagne, author of Nola Face: A Latina's Life in the Big Easy "At once fierce and exquisitely tender, The Heart Folds Early is a breathtaking journey into the mind of a mother grappling with an impossible choice. Jill Christman has written a profoundly generous book, offering her story with open palms and, in doing so, affirming the right of every woman to be the authority on her own body and life."--Nicole Graev Lipson, author of Mothers and Other Fictional Characters "This book is a continuous wonder, a compulsively readable story told with keen wisdom and nerves of steel about the fierce desire to grow and birth babies from a full life of one's own. Christman plows right through the pastel curtain around labor and delivery, revealing exactly why the mother and creator of life must wield the power to control this dangerous, bloody, and powerful act and to choose a future for herself and her children."--Sonya Huber, author of Voice First: A Writer's Manifesto