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March 6, 2026
from The Heart Folds Early
by Jill Christman
“The pain was a fire, then a knife, a slaying, finally I will be killed, and then many knives. How could I not yet be dead?”
—Jill Christman
Jill Christman, a writer featured often at The Humble Essayist, has a new memoir called The Heart Folds Early. It is a story of abuse and loss, but also love and birth. Many have praised Christman’s new book for her ability to find humor amid agony—which is her gift—but I was moved by her message of healing from pain in order "to love more deeply" which is her superpower.
The Paragraph of the Week
Science still cannot point to one thing that brings it on, but from the inside, labor is fantastically elemental, a pull of the moon on the body's tides, pushing and receding. Labor crashed me and my boy against the packed sand and then lifted us up again, cradling our nested bodies in the soft, rocking waters. And there was pain, the deepest pain I have ever known—a fiery pain burning in what felt to me like the perfect center of my body, boiling lava pooling behind my pubic bone and flowing out through my limbs, down my arms and into my wrists and ankles, curling my fingers and stiffening my toes. The pain was a fire, then a knife, a slaying, finally I will be killed, and then many knives. How could I not yet be dead? Shouldn't I die now? And then, for two minutes, or near the end of a transition that lasted nearly five hours, just a few seconds, a respite: The pain stops, disappears. A stillness, complete. What other pain is like that?
—Jill Christman
Commentary
Jill Christman has endured much pain. She was sexually abused for years by an older, teenage pervert as a child, lost a fiancé, Colin, to a fireball in a car accident, barely survived bulimia, lost a son through miscarriage, and made the agonizing decision to abort a fetus with half a heart, a rare condition called hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Now in labor again for the last time, she reenacts these pains: the “boiling lava pooling” within and flowing through her body, the stabbing pain like a knife and then many knives. Her “wails echoed off the walls” though she was “lucid enough” to say that the other women in delivery “are going to be glad when I have this baby and shut the fuck up.” So, yes, much pain, but she is “determined to hang onto what joy remains in the world” in order to heal and “love more deeply," and she has had much light in her life as well. Colin showed her how to love again despite so much sexual abuse. After his death she fell in love with her husband, the poet Mark Neely, who taught her how to laugh again and based on this memoir loves her dearly and is the most sensible person in her life. She gave birth to her “impossibly beautiful” daughter, Ella, and is about to have a son, Henry. Above all for us, she survived to create paragraphs like this one—works of art—that embody our pain and transcend it.
—THE
The Visible Speaking
Check out Kathryn Winograd’s new blog of words and photos called The Visible Speaking here. Read our feature of her book by the same name here.
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Announcements
New Feature
The Humble Essayist Book Club
A book club for essayists? Yes! Several times a year The Humble Essayist will devote an entire month of features to a book by one major essayist or an issue of a magazine and we invite you to read along. Our first book will be George Orwell: Selected Essays (Oxford). We will run the features during the month of September and encourage you to comment on it online. More to come.—THE
The Beloved Republic Recognized
by the PEN Award Series
The Beloved Republic has been selected for the Longlist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
PEN International is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous International PEN centres in more than 100 countries.
Other goals include emphasizing the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; fighting for freedom of expression, and acting as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes killed for their views.
See the trailers below to learn more about the book.
The Beloved Republic by Steven Harvey
Available at Bookstores and Online
See more at the author's website and check out our video trailers here.
The Humble Essayist Press
Closes Book Publication Arm
The Humble Essayist Press has always needed to stay humble in its ambitions, and with the publication of our final book, Time's Passage by Robert Root, the passage of time has brought the book publication arm of the Humble Essayist Press to an end. Its editors have set off on other composing and editing projects with much appreciation and admiration for the texts that THE Press was allowed to bring into the world. We hope those books continue to have readers and to those authors we urge, “Write on.” Thanks so much for giving us what you did.
All of the press's publications are still available. You can find them here. The Humble Essayist will still carry on and continue to feature the Paragraph of the Week.
