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Title details for Consent by Jill Ciment - Available

Consent

A Memoir

by Jill Ciment
Eileen Stevens
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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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

    June 11, 2024

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593868690
      • File size: 115578 KB
      • Duration: 04:00:47

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Reflection is central to the memoir. In this one, Jill Ciment reconsiders the events she wrote about in her first memoir, HALF A LIFE, 28 years ago. Eileen Stevens's narration embraces the author's candid questioning as she wonders--in the context of the #MeToo movement and her husband Arnold Mesches's death after 45 years of marriage-- how she should think about the relationship she began with the 47-year-old American artist when she was only 17. Stevens's performance enhances the careful detailing of scenes that give their courtship and long marriage verisimilitude. Some are even dissected and re-composed from new perspectives. Stevens also evokes the author's thoughtful scrutiny of how a writer might revisit memories, find them faulty, and come up with a very different story. S.W. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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