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.
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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.
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