DARKROOM: A Family Exposure

"I have always been obsessed with photographs. Now I am obsessed with memory," writes Christman, recalling Marguerite Duras's declaration that "[p]hotographs promote forgetting." This Ball State University English professor's account of her first 30 years ruminatively details a counterculture childhood and complicated adulthood, and varies between the harrowing and prosaic. The tale begins with a horrific event before she was even born: Christman's toddler brother was severely burned in the shower while their father was distracted and their mother was at work. Burned over 80% of his body, the boy spent nearly a year in the hospital. The incident precipitated the eventual dissolution of her parents' marriage and consequently impelled Christman's quest to exhume memories. Happy times are rare. Ugly reminiscences surface at age 19, when years of bulimia and self-mutilation propel her into therapy. There, she reveals an ordeal of sexual abuse by a teenaged neighbor. The following year, Christman's 22-year-old fiancé is killed in an accident, and her beloved grandmother, keeper of the photo albums in which Christman searches for answers, dies a slow death. Her marijuana-growing uncle, whom she loves dearly, bleeds to death in prison. Throughout, Christman struggles with the concept of how memory shapes the present and reshapes the past. She incorporates into the text elements of her artist parents' work as well as family photographs, and her language ranges from an alternately lush and ethereal literariness to a deliberate grimness illuminated by hope. This book, winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, is difficult yet forceful. (Oct. 14)