Published by University of Nebraska Press March 1, 2026: Pre-order your copy today!
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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?
In The Heart Folds Early, Jill Christman folds the mournful recklessness of the twenty-year-old 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? As mothers, how do we carry life and death in our bodies and survive with our hearts intact?
The Heart Folds Early asks us to let our conversations around reproductive rights and abortion be as complicated and nuanced as they need to be, remembering—always—that an imagined choice is not a choice.
From the prologue:
“Why do we pretend we know? We do not know, we cannot know, unless we are, in fact, carrying a pregnancy in a particular time with every factor and set of circumstances that precise moment holds. An imagined choice is not a choice. A theoretical choice is a thought experiment, nothing more. The choice has to be a real choice, and then the decision needs to result in one or the other: an abortion or not an abortion.”
Praise for If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays
“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
