grief and healing and lots of love

Every once in a while I love to throw an essay collection in among the usually quite long fantasy and sci-fi books that line the physical shelves of my room and metaphorical shelves of my "to be read." I'm very happy with this selection of essays, and have had it recommended to me time and again considering a few of my previous professors know the author, and one of my previous graduate cohort peers had Christman as her thesis second reader.
I really am a fan of easy collections that have a pretty clear theme or through line I can follow through nearly every essay. I think this collection does a great job of that, though those throughlines are not for the faint of heart. These essays contain immense heartbreak and love after that heartbreak written in sometimes striking, always beautiful prose.
I want to focus the rest of my review on my 5-star essays from this collection (so many of them were 4-stars, mind you):

"The Sloth"
I had this piece given to me in a creative nonfiction writing class years back, and now it's one of the main pieces of creative nonfiction I've given to groups of students to study the basic elements of parallelism and flash nonfiction. I think every single sentence in this piece does so much heavy lifting. To have placed it at the very beginning of the collection offsets the tone of what's to come, too. The depiction of grief being as slow as a sloth is profound.


"Slaughterhouse Island"
This essay really kept me in a firm grip concerning the heartbreaking account of the author's story of rape and very elucidating thoughts on the aftermath, years and years down the road once she is a mother to a daughter. This particular portrait of violence against women through Christman's personal experience resonated with me simply because I can identify with being a woman in a world where violence may be right around the corner, and neat and clean answers about why or how that violence happens time and time again are not at the ready. This was one of those pieces with such striking language at times that I had to put the book down and stare out the window for intervals.


"Naked Underneath Our Clothes"
This one made me think about teaching in new lights as it details a quite embarrassing story from Christman's earlier teaching days. It made me think about how I might've tried to react to or recover from the same situation, as well as how I would've reacted to students intent on "being right" in a space that was meant for challenging worldviews rather than remaining complacent. In a lot of ways, I saw some of the young teacher and career woman I'm becoming in the pages of this true story. I also loved the footnotes included in this essay; this was a stylistic choice not replicated in any of the others, but I think it works well to give asides and further thoughts about teaching that would otherwise interrupt the flow of the story.



Some of my favorite quotes from If This Were Fiction: A Love Story in Essays:

"To survive, we might bury our traumas or skirt the edges of our grief, but to heal, we have to go right through the middle. We have to know what's in the dark places. We have to point to who scares us and see what makes us sad---give them all names. There's no other way through."

"Love is an art. Love takes practice."

"How close we come at every corner, in every generation, to having different stories to tell to an entirely different audience of beloveds. In any lasting love story, seriously, what are the chances?"

"Empathy is the antidote to judgement, but we are a people who love to point fingers and draw boxes. That terrible thing? That will happen over there, to someone else, to someone who didn't follow the rules."

"I say 'maybe' a lot when I'm teaching. The longer I'm in the classroom, the less sure I am of anything, and the more willing I am to travel into uncertainties. This is not a bad thing."

"Teaching is hard in many of the same ways writing is hard: you have to be prepared, and you have to be willing to let go of your plan and follow the surprises; you have to be brave; you have to know the rules---and when to break them. Some days, teaching is like a dance, and others can feel more like a wrestling match. Either way, you might come out sweating."

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