Error loading page.
Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help.

Consent

A Memoir

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF THE YEAR • 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.
  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

  • Formats

  • Languages

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      April 1, 2024
      The novelist revisits her unconventional marriage. Ciment begins by describing meeting her husband of 45 years, Arnold, when, at 16, she enrolled in his drawing class. After six months, they kissed and soon after began a sexual relationship. "He was forty-seven, married for twenty-five unfaithful years," she writes about previously documenting their affair in her 1996 memoir, Half a Life, from which she quotes. Now, decades later, Ciment looks back at both her marriage and her writing about it, wondering if her marriage was "fruit from the poisonous tree." She recalls a stranger approaching the couple when Arnold was in his 70s and asking her, "How much do you get paid to take care of him?" In considering the early days of their involvement, she writes, "I cannot imagine how he was justifying his behavior to himself." The author calls attention to things that her prior memoir "gets wrong," from its glossing over objections, to his pursuit of a minor, to omitting the existence of one of his other lovers. Within months--a stint in which he taught Ciment how to use chopsticks as well as how to please him sexually--Arnold left his wife to live with the author, then 17. She touches on her Oedipal issues and repeatedly points out that Arnold "was old enough to be my father." The author writes that she ended her first memoir at the age of consent: "I did not want to write about a middle-aged man who had given up his kids and house and car and bank accounts for a teenager." Ciment is candid about numerous private details, including her unspoken fear that she would become "Arnold's lifelong apprentice, forever mired in the emergent state of promising," and recounts respective successes and struggles--creative and personal--preceding and including Arnold's death. A hot bullet of a memoir.

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Booklist

      Starred review from June 1, 2024
      If someone told you that a 16-year-old girl had an affair with a 47-year-old married art teacher with children your assumptions would likely be the opposite of what transpired with novelist Ciment (The Body in Question, 2019) and artist Arnold Mesches. Ciment recounted her wild childhood in her first memoir, Half a Life (1996). Here she picks up the story, detailing how she and Arnold fell in love in a time so very different from the present and how Arnold gave up familial middle-class stability to live on the edge with a teenager as she toughed her way through art school. Devoted to each other and to their mutual creativity, they were married for 45 years, until Arnold's death at 93. Ciment shares some staggering experiences of her own, but focuses most on their support for each other as she turned to writing and he painted every day through times of recognition and neglect, eventually turning the 760-page dossier the FBI compiled on him during his communist years into a master work. In this sharply candid anatomy of a relationship and spellcasting remembrance, Ciment reflects on the dubious start to their union and how their roles switched over time. By turns stinging, hilarious, and poignant, this is rare and luminous testimony to creativity, commitment, and love over all.

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

Languages

  • English

Loading