Darkroom: A Family Exposure

by Christman, Jill

• ISBN13: 9780820324449
• ISBN10: 0820324442
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-10-01
• Publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr

Summary

Darkroom: A Family Exposureis 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.Darkroomis 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.

Author Biography

Jill Christman is an assistant professor of English at Ball State University.

Table of Contents

Burned Images	1	(12)
Swinging	12	(10)
Baby in the Bubble	22	(10)
The Ingraham Family, 1970-1980	32	(13)
Condition of Pregnancy	45	(13)
Care and Feeding	58	(7)
Tracks, Signs, and Scat	65	(11)
Sentencing	76	(16)
Launching the Prozac Nation	92	(13)
Picture This	105	(9)
Storyboards	114	(16)
Isolated Monkey	130	(5)
Highway 101 Tillamook	135	(18)
Grieving in Costa Rica	153	(6)
Sentencing II	159	(9)
Days on the Wall	168	(13)
Days on the Wall II	181	(18)
Sweet Home Alabama	199	(16)
Get the Crown Royal	215	(12)
That Place I've Been Looking For	227	(9)
Is This the Image You Want to Be Left With?	236