Her Choice to Make: A Review of Jill Christman’s The Heart Folds Early
From the first pages of Jill Christman’s new memoir, The Heart Folds Early, readers know what is at stake. Midway through a much-wanted pregnancy, Christman and her husband learn that their unborn son has hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Their baby is missing half its heart.
Christman is a creative writing professor at Ball State University, and a senior editor at River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. She also writes fearlessly and fiercely about motherhood. In her memoir, Christman shares some of the most vulnerable parts of her procreational journey.
Christman contextualizes the diagnosis among other traumas. Heading into this ill-fated pregnancy in 2006, Christman admits she was “pretty fucking damaged.” She had been sexually abused by a neighbor from 6 to 12 years old, when, fearing pregnancy, she turned the table on her abuser and managed to stop the abuse. But the blows had already landed. Christman writes, “We can help the woman I became, but for the girl, there’s no rescue. It will always be too late.”
Christman experienced a second major life trauma when the fiancé of her early twenties, Colin, died in a car accident. In the first sentence of Chapter One, Christman writes: “Before we lost the baby—correction: before we chose to end my pregnancy and let our broken-hearted baby die—Colin’s accident was the grief story at the center of my life on this planet, almost burning me to ashes as he had been burned.”
For Christman, the loss of Colin was followed by a period of healing, from grief and from an eating disorder that began when she was 13. Of her bulimia she writes, “I didn’t binge. I was in it for the purging, the opening up and letting go.” The purging only ended after Colin died. At first, she thought she’d die. “But I didn’t die. Instead, I stopped throwing up. Instead, I honored Colin’s love by taking care of myself.”
After the trauma of her childhood and early adulthood, Christman took care to map out her unfolding adult life, family planning included. She writes, “I was pregnant seven months into my first tenure-track job, married seven months before the birth of my first child. The numbers say plenty about my life, especially when I tell you that I may have made some mistakes, but there were no accidents.” Unfortunately, an absence of accidents did not prevent the universe from handing Christman an excruciating choice.
The core narrative of the memoir takes place against the backdrop of the early aughts, focusing on Christman’s 30s. At that time, Roe v. Wade had been the law of the land for three decades. Women had a federally protected, constitutional right to choose how, when, or if they would procreate. Christman’s baby’s heart diagnosis came two decades before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed states to outlaw abortions in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (Dobbs). Christman’s decision to tell her story came after Dobbs.
Christman never thought she’d be faced with the decision of whether to terminate a pregnancy. “The worst thing is always something we don’t see coming,” Christman writes. “The thing that takes us down is the thing we cannot even imagine.” After Dobbs, Christman knew it was time to tell her own pregnancy second-trimester abortion story, “because the late-term abortions no one wants to think about need to be part of the national conversation.”
The Heart Folds Early is about choice. This memoir brings readers into the room in which a late-term diagnosis unfurls, one that impacts the health of the growing fetus, giving rise to an impossible but necessary choice. Christman wants her audience to understand that “we never know what we’ll choose in a situation until we’re standing with our noses pressed up against it.” Later in the memoir, she writes, “every story that ends in a baby—or no baby—is endlessly complex. . . . I didn’t want to make a different choice, but I did want my baby back.”
Just past the halfway point of this memoir, Christman describes the moment she and her husband found out about their baby’s incomplete heart. Christman transitions into a present tense account of those fateful moments surrounding the diagnosis, bringing an immediacy to her painful story. At Christman’s 20-week ultrasound appointment, the technician, Julie, “swishes her wand like a majorette,” but then her face changes.
“What,” I say. “What is it?”
Julie can’t tell us, but she doesn’t lie.
“It’s not for me to say,” she says quietly, “but his heart doesn’t look quite right on the left side.”
Julie leaves the room and returns with a doctor. The doctor tells them, “Your baby has only half a heart. Just the right, not the left.”
Christman writes, “If you asked me to choose one word now, in this telling, for that room in those minutes, the word would be doom. . . . Our bodies were tied to the tracks. The train was coming and we would watch the accident happen.”
That same day, they are sent to a pediatric cardiologist. The cardiologist informs Christman and her husband that their baby was also missing an aorta. She writes, “Our hands shake. We shake and shake and the cardiologist offers neither solace nor hope. . . . All our baby’s miracles have come and gone.”
There was a decision to be made. Because they received this news at a Catholic hospital, they had to intuit this part on their own while they were advised about the possibility of surgeries: “Immediately after his birth, doctors would take him for his first surgery, and if he survived, they would take him again and again, cracking open his chest, playing god, but not as good as god. Playing god, but with the resulting heart still being one that would hold him back, keep him blue.”
They had days, not months or even weeks to do their own research, to make this decision. After gathering all the information about hypoplastic left heart syndrome available in 2006, they made the best decision they could.
For Christman, part of grieving involved writing letters to this baby that would never live outside her womb. In one of the letters included in this memoir, Christman writes:
Remember, please, Baby: We would have laid down our lives for you. But we could not, would not, lay down yours. . . . The best-case scenario was so bad, Baby. So bad. We could not put you through all that pain to have, still, just half a heart.
While Christman’s singular choice anchors this memoir, it’s not the whole story. By providing readers with the specifics of her before and after, Christman helps readers understand the weight of this choice, one that falls within the context of a broad swath of her life. There is before this difficult decision and after. The after includes a miscarriage, and then, another attempt at pregnancy because “I needed to draw in a little brother or sister to stand beside Ella at my grave, to put a loving arm around her.”
The last chapters of this memoir describe this last pregnancy, which occurred at what Christman describes with her trademark humor “the alarming maternal age of thirty-eight.” This time, when it was time for the mid-term ultrasound, they saw “color everywhere. . . . Color in all four chambers.”
While many heartrending traumas ripple through the pages of this memoir, they never capsize it with their weight. Christman shifts between darkness and effervescence, weaving moments of levity into her story, like when she writes about being cast as an “elderly multigravida” or a “habitual aborter.” She goes on:
Who makes these terms up? No man who wants to get close to a woman without a gleaming set of metal stirrups intervening, but probably a man. Let’s take a moment to consider a pair of particularly rich obstetrical charges leveled against a woman: “blighted ovum” and “incompetent cervix.”
Seriously? You’re going to tell a woman who’s just learned her pregnancy is over, may have stopped growing weeks earlier while she allowed herself to hope, her egg is “blighted?”
Or when Christman joyfully proclaims the right to tell her own birth stories and, in doing so, gives other women permission to tell their birth stories:
Why, then, do we return again and again to stories of war, of boxing, of football, of teenage testosterone brawls against clanging lockers? Why are we drawn to these battle stories, stories of terrible pain, and not to the ones we can hope will end in birth? Is it because we tell ourselves the men’s stories are really about strength and courage? . . . Why then not women’s stories as well? The birth stories that gave each of us, every one, homemakers and gladiators alike, our very breath? Our whole lives.
Thoughtfully arranged and beautifully written, The Heart Folds Early is a page-turning memoir that invites readers into some of the most vulnerable, raw vistas of a woman’s life. In the process, Christman sheds some much-needed understanding on the complex optics that accompany later-term abortion decisions. Braving the oppositional fervor by which such pregnancy terminations are often met, Christman generously offers up this story of a choice only she could make. She offers up this story with her whole heart.
3 replies on “Her Choice to Make: A Review of Jill Christman’s The Heart Folds Early”
Ordering immediately.
Loved this memoir and appreciate this beautiful review!
Thank you so much for this smart, engaged and engaging review, Heidi–and thanks to everyone for reading! LITERARY MAMA has been an important part of my reading and writing life since before the birth of my first baby (who is now–gulp–almost twenty-three). I’m grateful to be part of this community.
[https://literarymama.com/articles/departments/2006/12/bringing-on-baby]