IF THIS WERE FICTION

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.