Barrelhouse Reviews: If This Were Fiction, by Jill Christman
Review by Brianna Avenia-Tapper
University of Nebraska Press / September 2022 / 228 pp
“To give birth,” wrote Sarah Ruddick in Maternal Thinking, “is to create a life that cannot be kept safe, whose unfolding cannot be controlled and whose eventual death is certain.” Jill Christman explores that bald and painful fact in her new essay collection, If This Were Fiction. An author, professor, and mother, Christman worries about many things, “but mostly,” she writes, “I worry about the physical safety of my kids. All the time.” With humor born of self-awareness, Christman’s book asks how we can bear to love in such a dangerous world.
Christman’s fears did not begin in motherhood. Her history of sexual abuse, her brother’s near-fatal burning, and the sudden early death of her fiancé—tragedies that open the book—make her anxiety particularly acute, even before she has children. She becomes a mother knowing how much a child can be hurt, how easy it is to lose the people we love. Her concerns balloon out beyond her own children to the safety and well-being of strangers’ children, to the child she once was, and even to her abuser, “barely more than a kid himself.” The breadth of her worry pushes the writing from an emotional account of parental anxiety to a more general exploration of vulnerability.
Like Ruddick, who asserts that children “must be watched, but not watched too closely,” Christman knows that having a good life—loving herself and her children well—entails making mistakes. Attempts at protection “can implode, constricting your whole life, until one day you’re sitting in a locked steel box breathing through an air hole with a straw and wondering, Now? Now am I safe?” This is not what Christman wants for her children or herself. She wants her children to be brave. She wants to be brave. By cataloguing this quest, Christman shows the reader how to be brave, too.
In one particularly hilarious essay, Christman tells the story of the time her two-year-old daughter Ella hid a googly eye in her nose. Maybe, Christman thought, this was part of an uninformed attempt by Ella to see up inside her body. She asks Ella why she did this thing. Ella, with classic two-year-old pith, says simply, “I thought it would be different.”
“Yes,” writes Christman, “that’s it!...I thought it would be different.” This idea is such potent medicine for accepting one’s own mistakes. Reading the essay’s conclusion felt like an absolution. “But then, what if we could stick googly eyes in our noses to see the dark secrets of our bodies? How cool would that be?”
If This Were Fiction does not only offer acceptance. It is also a map. Generously, Christman sets the reader on a path that goes straight through calamity and comes out the other side with wisdom. The secret, Christman suggests, is story. She explains that, in writing our lives into story, “we work our way to a kind of cohesion, an order in the senselessness we can live with.” Agency, ownership, and some semblance of control—no matter how small—can bloom from “the speaking of words that have gone unsaid. The brazen act of telling a story all the way through to the end.”
In her essay, “Life’s Not a Paragraph,” Christman narrates her real relationship, messy and complex, as a fairy tale, complete with a happily ever after. I don’t mean to say she stuffs her romance like a taxidermied animal, that she makes something living into something fake. I mean that she shows readers (and writers) how to use story to construct our lives, how to make meaning from struggle, how to create of ourselves a protagonist with the power to choose.
“Life’s Not a Paragraph” includes one of the best moments in the book. Christman describes being at a bar with a female friend, her then-boyfriend, and her future husband. She asked both men a question, “Britney Spears or Gwen Stefani?” meaning, whom would you rather have sex with?
“Britney,” says her boyfriend, and her female friend’s “left eyebrow arches up as high and bright as an exit sign.”
“Gwen,” says her future husband. That, she writes, is when she chose him. Her story insists on this choosing. Maybe her story reports on an act of choosing, or maybe the question of choosing lies in how she tells her story. The point is that the narrative makes her strong.
If This Were Fiction is a book for survivors and parents and writers. After I finished, I found myself returning with highlighters. I wanted to take her creation apart the way a mechanic dissembles a motor or a carpenter assesses a cabinet. I ran my palms along her edges and peered into her joints. Why did I lose myself in the narrative here? How was that transition so effortless? Why does this part follow that one? Not every essay packs as much of a punch as “The Googly Eye,” but despite their previous publications in various journals over several years, Christman’s essays fit together well, creating a whole which strengthens its parts.
The collection is cohesive partially because the final essay answers questions asked in earlier sections of the book. That final essay, “Spinning,” is perhaps the best example of writing choice into one’s story, but to tell the plot would be to spoil the pleasure of reading it. I’ll just say that “Spinning” shows Christman doing as Ruddick suggests, recognizing in herself “the delusive, compulsive efforts to see everywhere and control everything so that a child will be safe.” The world is inescapably unsafe. The world is ever spinning. Our children will one day walk away from us into their own lives, and we give them as much as we can spare of our bodies and our minds anyway. But we need not be victims of this terrifying uncertainty. Instead, we can choose—that is to say, we can engage with this situation as Christman learns to: with bravery and generosity.
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.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper is a writer, editor, and mom whose work has been featured in Tahoma Literary Review, Hobart, Pigeon Pages, Literary Mama and elsewhere. She is currently revising her memoir Deciduata, about birth, control, and birth control. Formerly a teacher in the US, Russia, and Kazakhstan, Brianna lives in NYC with her family. You can find her on Twitter @Aveniatapper.