If this were fiction A love story in essays

Christman (Borrowed Babies) considers love, loss, and the art of writing in these luminous essays. The narrative is broken into three parts, each of which is named after a poem by E.E. Cummings, and a main thread pertains to the death of Christman's fiancé in a car accident at the age of 22 and her life after it. In "Going Back to Plum Island," Christman grapples with the idea that art can be a form of therapy, initially resisting the notion, but eventually accepting it: "in both (good) therapy and writing, we work our way to a kind of cohesion, an order in the senselessness we can live with." "The Avocado," meanwhile, is a moving account of the author reckoning with "how much work I had to do before my body was mine" in the wake of her fiancé's death, and in "The Sloth," she memorably compares grief to the mammal's slow crawl: "This slow seemed impossible, not real." Christman's writing is moving and poetic, and she has a knack for imbuing profundity into everyday activities, whether slicing an avocado or climbing a hill. Fans of the personal essay shouldn't miss these intimate encounters. (Sept.)

A memoirist and creative writing instructor reflects on transcending personal loss and trauma to embrace the healing love of a successful family life. "Here are the facts," writes Christman at the beginning. "As close as I can align the memories and the photographs with the markers of time--birthdays, moves, my mother's sequential boyfriends and waitressing jobs--Chad [her teenage neighbor] molested me, regularly and sometimes violently, from the time I was six or seven to age twelve." Memories of those encounters eventually became the basis for a memoir she first submitted as a series of stories to an MFA short fiction class. Yet her catharsis remained incomplete even after the manuscript was published. In this collection, Christman revisits her past to understand how terrible events shaped her attitude toward love and relationships. She begins with a recollection of how the dreams she had about Chad's abuse continued long after her life, which included a detour into "bulimia and binge drinking," settled into happier rhythms. But rather than recall his violence, the dreams manifested as terrifying scenarios that involved Chad going after Christman's own daughter. Her own successful marriage did not come without its own share of twists and turns, including relationships with others, separations, and comic reversals of fortune. Through it all, she writes about the persistent, irrational fear of "the death of those I love." She attributes her phobia to the death of another man she loved as a young woman, Colin, to whom she had been engaged and who haunted her still. His horrific car crash death brought her into painful awareness that while she could "love a breathing someone…like that, he could be gone." Eloquent and probing, Christman's essays examine the profound ways relationships can--for better or worse--transform an individual life and provide glimpses into the complexities the human heart. A warmly wise, intimate memoir. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The Sloth There is a nothingness of temperature, a point on the body's mercury where our blood feels neither hot nor cold. I remember a morning swim on the black sand eastern coast of Costa Rica four months after my twenty-two-year-old fiancé was killed in a car accident. Walking into the sea, disembodied by grief, I felt no barriers between my skin, the air, and the water. Later, standing under a trickle of water in the wooden outdoor shower, I heard a rustle, almost soundless, and looking up, expecting something small, 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. He peered down at me, his flattened head turned backward on his neck. Here is a fact: a sloth cannot regulate the temperature of his blood. He must live near the equator. I thought I knew slow, but this guy, this guy was slow. The sound I heard was his wiry-haired blond elbow, brushed green with living algae, stirring a leaf as he reached for the next branch. Pressing my wet palms onto the rough wooden walls, I watched the sloth move in the shadows of the canopy. Still reaching. And then still reaching. 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. We were numb to the speed of the world. We were one temperature. Excerpted from If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays by Jill Christman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.