The Heart Folds Early: A Memoir

This book is about what it means to make a choice. As mothers, how do we carry life and death in our bodies and survive with our hearts intact?

The Heart Folds Early is a story of transformation through tragedy, and an examination of the way in which great loss can make us simultaneously fearful and intrepid. Emerging from a childhood that included both devastating sexual abuse and the sustaining joy of being deeply (if imperfectly) loved, Jill Christman’s sights were set on building and protecting her own happy family--until her fiancé was killed in a car accident.

Christman folds the mournful recklessness of the young widow she was against the backdrop of her later marriage and new motherhood, including the choice to end a half-term pregnancy when a routine ultrasound revealed her baby boy had just half a heart. Courageous, clear-eyed, tender, and unexpectedly funny, Christman’s book reflects on her life and asks: What happens when we’re afraid the worst thing will happen and then, sometimes, it does? What does it mean to make and live with a heartrending choice? How do we carry life and death in our bodies and survive with our hearts intact?

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.