Darkroom: A Family Exposure

by Jill Christman, Lynda J. Morgan (Contributor), Matthew McKee (Editor)

Darkroom: A Family Exposure is Jill Christman's gripping, funny, and wise account of her first thirty years. Although her story runs the gamut of dramatic life events, including childhood sexual abuse, accidental death, and psychological trauma, Christman's poignant memoir is much more than a litany of horrors; instead, it is an open-eyed, wide-hearted, and good-humored look at a life worth surviving. 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.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

254 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2002

Reviews

[this_eel · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are some strong moments in here, especially regarding grief over her fiancé. I actually picked the book up because someone showed me a flash essay of hers about reflecting on this grief while watching a sloth move across a branch. That piece was lovely.

In book form things become a bit of a jumbled scramble— at the end of the day I feel like she was still drafting when the book went to print. I don’t like the conceit of conversations with herself. I don’t really like the way she hops back and forth in time and subject matter, not as a default position against writing this way but because I don’t think she does it exceptionally well. I don’t really like that she starts the whole book on the defensive (arguing for why something that happened to her brother before she is born IS about her) and in this defensiveness fails to defend against how much of the book is actually other people’s lives being turned into the interesting things about her for the purposes of this project. (Actually, I am surprised to realize how little sense of Jill I have by the end of the book; what sense I do have is not something I enjoyed very much, which is a terrible risk of reading and writing memoir.)

As a reader, I didn’t find that this hit. As a person, I understand her rejection of therapists and I hope that writing this book was more helpful in tending to grief and trauma than the therapists were. You do simply have to find your own way to live with things if you’re going to live, and one thing that’s certainly true in the style and content of this book is that the author found her chosen battleground for wrestling pain into submission. That is a messy process and it is therefore unsurprising to find it a messy book. The visibility of someone’s deep struggle not just in their enumerated traumas but in the combative disorder of their storytelling is a terribly brave and vulnerable thing; I dearly hope it has helped.

[Casey Kiser · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intricate and intimate, a work of art revolving around memories and photographs. Such a fascinating subject - memories. An original and refreshing read. Loved it.

[Richard Gilbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I reread this memoir after seven or eight years because my students and I loved three of her essays we studied. Having written my own memoir and read a boatload of memoirs in the meantime, I had developed my taste. I got a lot more out of it the second time because I saw what Jill Christman is doing with memory, trauma, and her distanced, wiser self.

In her telling, the many traumas in her life—including a brother's nearly fatal scalding, her sexual molestation, a fatal car accident, another death, and a lethal imprisonment—are not sensational plot points but, rather, parts of a legacy she lives with and is trying to resolve. Her stance as an inquiring survivor, with effective but sparing dramatization of the past, is key to the high literary quality of Darkroom and to the fact that it's not unbearably harrowing to read.

Photographs and memories, metaphors for each other, and their shifting meanings form the ground of her inquiry. What's interesting ultimately is her survival, her healing, her wisdom, and the literary shaping of her experience—these are this memoir's gifts. This is a memoir to be savored and honored as a work of art.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had difficulty reading this. A lot of the subject matter is very troubling (graphic child abuse, self abuse, etc). And the style is kind of jigsaw, which works for some readers, but, perhaps this was my poor reading skill at work, I felt like questions were raised that were left to dangle unanswered. Not everything, but some central strands. Perhaps the book, covering 30 some years, is too broad. Maybe this book is three memoirs in one. I can't fault the author. She's utterly skilled. I'm just more of a linear reader, I guess. Otherwise, the book is chilling, devastating even.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honest, bold, and at times funny, this is such a powerful read!

[Crystal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christmas is a gifted workshop leader at a conference I attend annually so I wanted to read more than just a short piece written by her. Her memoir is creatively constructed and, as I see it, a family portrait, rather than singularly about her childhood molestation. There are parts of the picture that deal with that and parts of the picture that deal with loss. Happiness also appears in the picture through the relationship Christmas has with her mother and her lover, Colin, who pulls her from darkness. Reader be warned, there are many dark places here but Christman is not hopeless.

[Melissa Grunow · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book says so much about the intersection of family protection and darkness that is present in all of us. The victim and survivor are not interchangeable, and yet the seeking of truth becomes the dark messenger that everyone must negotiate and process themselves. Truth is a vital aspirstion that must be achieved if this family is to have any chance for unity.

[Sadie Naughton · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Jessica Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jill Christman is preoccupied with the family picture books, but she knows the books are works of fiction carefully curated by her grandmother – healthy, happy children, doting parents, explorations of flower-filled fields in the back yards of beloved grandparents. In Darkroom: A Family Exposure, Christman tells the family’s true story as much as she knows it, the story no one would gather from the edited collections of photos. The reader is fooled at the onset, having been led to believe the book is about Christman’s older brother, who was badly burned by hot water while under his father’s care. As the chapters progress, it becomes clear the book is about Christman’s childhood sexual abuse by an older child living next door and her resulting bulimia and troubled relationships with men. Though she takes pains to address the doubt she has about her memory and the license she takes with the narrative, there is so much discussion of these that the reader might find it difficult to trust a story that is frequently unclear. What is clear is the separation Christman creates between her remembering self and her remembered self as she presents the unfeeling, unmovable persona that hides what one would expect of an individual who has lived through Christman’s experiences - a frightened, confused, angry true self. Highly recommend, but this is extremely sensitive material that should come with a trigger warning.

[Amber · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three and a half. This author is brilliant, fascinating, candid. She is not flashy but she is just really really good at her art. The first 1/3 of the book and the last chapter of the book were so good they ached. Five stars and then some. The middle did move slow for me and I just couldn't engage quite as well, I didn't feel the magic of that first third. I almost didn't finish. But I am glad I did. The ending didn't make the middle more magical, but the ending was so lovely that I would have been at a loss to have missed. Highly recommend this book. It is one of a kind, collage-style (which she also plays with defining toward the end) material. Creative writers should read it for the craft lessons.

[Zara Lei Norman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read Christman through an essay she penned for ‘Not That Bad’, Roxane Gay’s anthology around sexual violence. Then and now, Christman has such a distinctive and playful way of writing about trauma that cuts to the root of what it means to puzzle through the ‘black spaces’ in our memory.
I still don’t know how to summarise my feelings about this book— so I’ll cleave to the section that resonated with me the most.

“I have not yet arrived.” These are Christman’s words near the end of her memoir, as she speaks to the expectation that anyone writing through their healing must have come to some enlightened understanding, some mythical “better place” following trauma. Christman has not yet arrived. The message here, for me, was not to hold out for that “place”. We might never reach it, not in our lifetime. What to do instead? That is still to be written.

[Abigail · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this. A memoir written as vignettes, so cleverly pieced together that Christman definitely managed to accomplish what I perceive was her desire for writing the book as if it were an old family photo album. Beginning with her older brother being badly burned before she was born and how that one event affected her life so dramatically to losing her fiancé in a car accident. All is told with incredible rawness and poignancy. I was in awe.

[Molly Ferguson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book really sticks with you. Christman describes devastating life events as though she's looking carefully at a photograph of someone else, and somehow they become unique and beautiful stories. I'd compare her writing to Cheryl Strayed's. The darkroom motif is carried through without being cliched, and Christman adds research and her own stylistic stamp to the memoir. I'm looking forward to reading _Borrowed Babies_ next.

[Jon · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was hard for me to thoroughly enjoy this book. During the time in which I read Christman's novel, I was depressed myself. The two were not a happy medium. I found no redemption or salvation in the text, and at my own fragile time I couldn't appreciate the beauty to Christman's writing. I'll most likely re-read this now.

[Becca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jill Christman was a professor of mine in college, and she made her book a required reading. It was awkward discussing her book in front of her. Were we supposed to given an honest opinion or praise her? Perhaps if I had read this on my own and not be forced into discussion, I might have enjoyed it differently.

[Bridget · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent. I can't think of what else to say about it. Christman makes connections that might have been left unconnected had she not mustered up the courage to write this book. Reading it was like watching someone heal before my eyes.

[L · Rating 3 out of 5]

well-crafted, heavy.

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars
Amazing memoir about a family and photos, sidetracked a little by unclue and by the ending (too much wrapping up) but writing and depth superb