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SALE TITLE Tax-exempt? | Darkroom A Family Exposure Through a shifting narrative of text and photographs, Christman explores the intersection of image and memory and considers the ways photographs force us to rework our original memories. Darkroom is a page-turning and disturbing journey that begins with an older brother's near fatal burning and progresses through a counterculture childhood in which her free-spirited mother moves the family to an isolated mountaintop. The story advances into an adolescence of eating disorders and barely remembered sex, slams into a young adulthood of love, literature, drugs, death, and therapists, and ends soon after a beloved uncle bleeds to death in a federal prison while serving a ten-year sentence for growing marijuana. Never sentimental, Jill Christman is brutally honest and surprisingly funny. She deftly blends narrative, quoted materials, her uncle's letters, and her father's photography to create a family saga that is both heartbreaking and exhilarating. Jill Christman is an assistant professor of English at Ball State University. October 2002 ISBN 0820324442 cloth • Sale Price: $7.49 / List Price: $29.95 264 pp. • 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 in. • 24 photosA volume in the seriesAssociation of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction "Jill Christman's Darkroom is a work of art, exquisitely written, spare, never self-indulgent. She pushes the memoir far beyond the usual litany of pain, Prozac and psychiatry to something transcendent and, at times, frighteningly beautiful. . . . Darkroom is raw and honest, a fine debut for a brave writer." —Barry Sanders"Christman employs a kind of collage technique to tell her story. She writes well; her style is sensual and juicy. . . . Darkroom could have been a maudlin read, but it's saved by Christman's insight and skill and leavened by occasional passages of humor." —Washington Post Book World"This is an account of remembrance, about memories that cannot be trusted unless they're verified by snapshots from a family scrapbook or verbally by another person. Christman's narrative has a dreamlike quality: it doubles back on itself, jumps from past to present, and flaunts the narrator's unreliability." —Kirkus Reviews"A survivor's tale full of brutal honesty and intelligence. Like Truman Capote and Alexandra Fuller, Jill Christman offers the reader unforgettable visual images, luminous and terrifying at the same time."-Julie Schumacher, author of The Body Is Water "Jill Christman begins her journey into the past by studying family photographs, then searches deeper, exploring memory, where profound truths are discovered. Some of Christman's memories surface like photos developed in acid; other memories are more gentle. What Christman wants us to know is that all memories, good and bad, remembered or reclaimed, are crucial to self-knowledge. In exquisite and compelling detail, Darkroom exposes Christman's family photographs in all their complexity and color."-Sue William Silverman, author, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You "It's a beautiful story, beautifully told. . . . Against all odds there is humor here, too, and in the end, the affirmation of a worthy life, won by a survivor."-John Carlson, The Muncie Star Press "Although at times offering shockingly personal revelations, Christman achieves an amazingly balanced perpective in this memoir about her family. In part, this balance is achieved by the clever way in which memory, letters, diary entries, quotations, and photographs are spliced together and juxtaposed to create a richly layered text. . . . The reader is privileged to be taken on a journey from Christman's childhood to the present, meeting tragedy (both sexual abuse and accidental death) and happiness at every turn of the page."-Rebecca Bollen, Library Journal"Darkroom contains quite a bit of what some wold call 'spice': sexual abuse, bulimia, a family member's imprisonment, and Prozac struggles. From its outset, however, Darkroom deploys its flashier elements with great taste. . . . Christman has written a brave and complex travelogue that sounds a loud ring of truth without begging us to be impressed with its honesty."-Max Winter, Colorado Review "[Christman's] language ranges from an alternately lush and ethereal literariness to a deliberate grimness illuminated by hope."-Publishers Weekly, October 14, 2002 |
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