Christman, Jill 1969–

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Christman, Jill 1969–

PERSONAL: Born 1969. Education: University of Alabama, M.F.A., 1999.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of English, Ball State University, Robert Bell 270, Muncie, IN 47306.

CAREER: Writer, memoirist, and educator. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, coordinator of creative writing program; Ball State University, Muncie, IN, assistant professor of English.

AWARDS, HONORS: Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, 2001, for Darkroom: A Family Exposure.

WRITINGS:

Darkroom: A Family Exposure (memoir), University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS: Author and memoirist Jill Christman is an assistant professor of English at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in creative nonflction. A practicing exponent of the style of creative nonflction, Christman writes regularly in that style and has been recognized with the 2001 Associated Writing Programs Award for her creative nonflction.

Darkroom: A Family Exposure is Christman's first book and is her memoir of growing up in a troubled family beset by pain and tragedy. Her early life was defined by an event that occurred before she was even born: about four years before her birth, her brother Ian, then thirteen months old, was badly burned in the shower with he was left there alone by their father. The child was hospitalized for almost a year, recovering from burns over eighty percent of his body. Consumed by guilt, her father left and the family crumbled, though a brief reconciliation between her parents three years later led to her conception. Still, her parents did not remain together, and the specter of Ian's injuries continued to hang heavily over the family. Christman describes in detail her difficult childhood, including sexual abuse by a neighbor that the family otherwise trusted; her episodes of bulimia during her adolescence; her mother's futile search for meaning in a counterculture lifestyle in an isolated cabin in Washington state; and her own bouts with depression, psychotherapy, and antidepressant medication during her adulthood. Other tragedies encroach on an already difficult life. Her fiancé is killed in an accident; her grandmother succumbs slowly to a lingering disease; and a beloved uncle, in prison on a marijuana charge, bleeds to death while incarcerated, unnoticed in his cell. Despite the tragedy she recounts, Christman's "poignant memoir is … more than a litany of horrors;… it is [a] … look at a life worth surviving," observed a reviewer on the November Coalition Web site.

A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the book "deft but hardly easy reading." In looking back so intently, Christman "struggles with the concept of how memory shapes the present and reshapes the past," noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer. "Preconceptions are challenged, experience is analyzed, and painful, socially relevant issues are unflinchingly exposed," commented Library Journal contributor Rebecca Bollen. In the end, Bollen noted in another Library Journal review, "The result is a richly layered text that draws extensively on Christman's knowledge of contemporary critical theory."