In 1996 in his autobiography Half a life (“Half a Life”, not translated into French), novelist Jill Ciment recounted her meeting with her future husband in 1970. “She was 17 years old; he was 47 years old, married with two teenage children,” writing The New York Times.
“Dreaming of becoming an artist, she enrolled in classes with Arnold Mesches, a famous painter whose works she admired (…) and one evening, after the lesson, she waited for the other students to leave and then approached him.”
I unbuttoned the first three buttons of my blouse, crossed the room with the ink-stained floor and kissed him, reported by this author recognized in the United States. Her husband and first reader, “we agreed on this key point: she initiated the kiss.”
However, after the death of the latter, in 2016, when the movement exploded #Me too, Jill Ciment saw her story differently. By re-reading half life “she said she was amazed at the way it distorted reality.” The night their adventure began, she stayed up late “ask for advice” to his teacher. “He pulled her to him and kissed her.”
The art of autobiography
Retrospectively, “She realized there was something wrong with his behavior – an older man, a teacher in a position of power, taking advantage of a female student.” Something she might not have allowed herself to think about while she was alive.
“The couple has this common mythology (…). But when your husband dies, it becomes your story.”
That’s how she came to publish her second autobiography, Consent (“Consent”), published on June 11 in the United States. “With an almost clinical distance, Jill Ciment exposes the shortcomings and factual errors of her first work and in the process questions the artifice inherent in autobiography as a literary form,” write The New York Times.
“Sometimes she reproduces whole passages from her first autobiography before retelling the same events, revealing by distortion or omission.”
In the second half of the book, she continues the story of her life where she left off, describing the last two decades of her marriage.
“We rarely see a writer questioning his own work and thus publicly dismantling it, underlines the sheet. Consent is a surprising and often confusing book: at once an autobiography linked to post-mortems, accusations and re-appropriations. And also, despite everything, a love story.”