If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays by Jill Christman

Dear Jill Christman, 

I’m running again. Small distances before the dark horizon, steady breathing below gray skies. I still have tendonitis, inflammation of the tendons in my left knee. It’s a fickle injury which retreats and flares, aches for hours and suddenly disappears. There is no easy cure, but running—even as it hurts— helps strengthen my knee’s tendons, increase blood flow, and bring me closer to that impossible place called “full recovery.” 

In your collection of essays, you deftly stretch and flex the delicate and injured tendons of memory to explore grief, love, and the relationship between the two. You traverse time, examining your relationship with your fiancé and his tragic death. You confront trauma by traveling back to your childhood home and knocking on your abuser’s door. You shed the guilt society attaches to your rape. Your essays inspire readers to have curiosity, bravery, and wit about the things that hurt us the most. 

Yet above all, as your title promises, you tell a love story. It is not a singular narrative, but rather an intertwined cluster of relationships; between you and your then twenty-two-year-old (my age now) fiancé Colin, your husband Mark, your two children, students, everyday strangers, and your younger self. In spite of the atrocities they illuminate, your collection serves as a celebration of love, a reminder to your children that “they can fly without crashing.” 

You cover an expansive range of themes, from motherhood to ornithology to the brain’s inner workings. Perhaps more impressively, you do so in a variety of lengths and styles. You open with the flash nonfiction piece “The Sloth.” At 265 words, it serves as a stunning meditation on grief: 

 “I saw my first three-toed sloth. Mottled and filthy, he hung by his meat-hook claws not five feet above my head in the cecropia tree […] What else is this slow? Those famous creatures of slow—the snail, the tortoise—they move faster. Much. This slow seemed impossible, not real, like a trick of my sad head. Dripping and naked in the jungle, I thought, That sloth is as slow as grief.”

You breathe life into grief itself, giving it a tangible form so vivid I can almost reach out and pat its “mottled and filthy” snout. You ground your reflections in feelings of the body, “Dripping and naked,” which adds depth to your sense of loss. You juxtapose the slow suspension of time with the brevity of the essay itself, compelling me to read it over and over again.

Your essay, “Slaughterhouse Island” is another striking piece which exemplifies your creative range and prowess. This thirteen-page essay begins by drawing the reader into the conversation through the use of the pronoun “we”: 

“We’re all allowed to be kids who mask our gut-deep insecurities with vanity. We get to wear crop-tops and tight jeans with a ribbon of lace for a belt and high-heeled boots. We get to check ourselves thirty times in the dorm-room mirror, necks craning to see how fat our skinny little asses look from the back,” 

Throughout your essays, you provide idiosyncratic specificity while maintaining a sense of universality. While I might not have worn “crop-tops and tight jeans with a ribbon of lace for a belt and high-heeled boots,” I certainly have masked my “gut-deep insecurities with vanity.” I certainly have checked myself many times in the dorm-room mirror. I have struggled to absolve myself of shame for the bad things that have happened to me. 

Like roads that stretch out past the cornfields, your essays provide a scenic route to be traveled. They are self-contained, with their own explorations and reflections. Yet strung together, they form an interconnected web of journeys which inform and enrich each other. Turning the pages, heartbeat thrumming, breath heavy, I felt as if I was running down each road you paved. And it was lovely, because you were running (spinning) right there beside me. 

Best,

Elijah Manning