From the acclaimed novelist (“A virtuoso”—Donna Seaman, Booklist), a deft, shocking memoir that asks whether we can judge past behavior by today’s moral codes, as the author reevaluates her decades-long marriage to the forty-seven-year-old man she met when she was seventeen, revisiting a singular passion in the 21st-century aftermath of #MeToo.
“Few writers can tackle the bedroom—or female libido . . . but Ciment is a master: in exquisitely spare prose, she nails it.” — The New York Times
In this unflinching account of the ardent love affair between the author and her painting teacher, which began in the 1970s, when she was a teenager and he was married with two children, Ciment not only reflects on how their love ignited (who leaned in first for that kiss?) but interrogates her 1996 memoir on the subject, Half a Life. She asks herself if she told the whole truth back then, and what truth looked like to her in the even longer-ago era of love-bead curtains when she fell in love, when no one asked who was served by the permissibility around a May-December romance. In the light of #metoo, with new understanding about the balance of power between an older man and an underage girl, Ciment re-explores the erotic wild ride and intellectual flowering that shaped an improbable but blissful marriage that lasted for forty-five years, until her husband’s death at ninety-three.
This riveting book about art, memory, and morality asks many questions along the way: Does a story’s ending excuse its beginning? Does a kiss in one moment mean something else entirely five decades later? Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself? Suffused with the wisdom that comes with time, Consent is an author’s brave recasting of her life’s settled narrative, and an urgent read for women of all ages.
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Consent just might be the new gold standard for the memoir. By revisiting a part of her life that she wrote about nearly three decades ago, comparing her then-account to the way she would describe the same events today, Jill Ciment asks exhilarating questions about who we are, how we let the stories we tell ourselves and others settle and define us. What makes Consent so fascinating is that Ciment kept the tapes: her previous account makes her able to turn her memories at different angles against the light. What really happened? Everything in her first memoir was true, and the story hasn’t changed (it is still, at its heart, a love story). Yet something has changed. Ciment tackles deep and painful issues without any fuss. In prose that is concise yet warm, unsparingly honest and often hilarious, she gives us this rarest of gifts: a book that is both urgently of its moment and absolutely timeless.
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Camille Bordas, author of How to Behave in A Crowd and The Material