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.

"This memoir is a nexus point between the personal and the political. By shedding light on the specific and varied lived realities that lead pregnant people to seek out abortions,The Heart Folds Early complicates the political story of abortion while providing the specificity of one woman's experience with grief and motherhood."—Molly Lindberg, Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal"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"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"With the right to reproductive autonomy still under attack, this memoir offers a compelling reminder of why we should never give up the fight."—Kelly Fordon, Rain Taxi

• Prologue 1. Sweet Home Alabama 2. Grief Is the Gorilla 3. Long Prairie Road and Highway 101 4. I Can’t Make You Love Me 5. Tongue and Groove 6. Feminist Fury: An Interlude 7. Testing Begets Testing 8. Becoming the Mother I Am 9. Ways of Seeing 10. Nothing’s Going to Change My World 11. Moona’s Story 12. The Secret of Secrets 13. The Eighteen-Week Ultrasound 14. Choice 15. Chicago 16. Between Heaven and Earth 17. What If It’s a Myth? 18. Painting Faces 19. The Heart Folds Early 20. L.B. 21. Vagina Will Find Vagina 22. The Angel and the Umbilical Rope 23. Give Me Your Hands Acknowledgments