Jill Ciment, Consent: A Memoir. Pantheon, 2024. 160 pp. $27.
Writer Jill Ciment’s new memoir Consent is a look back at her almost 50-year marriage with Arnold Mesches, her former art teacher, who she met when she was 17 and he 47. It is partly a continuation (and partly a reconsideration) of her first memoir, Half a Life, published in 1996 when Ciment was in her mid-forties. Now, 25 years later, after Arnold has died and the #MeToo movement has emerged, Ciment revisits her marriage to ask herself if it was still the fairy-tale romance she remembered it as.
The First Half
Ciment began Half a Life in 1993 when Arnold was 70. After struggling to write her first novel, Ciment wished to switch to autobiographical writing in order to, as she explains, “be able to spend more time analyzing my characters’ nuances rather than having to build them from scratch.” Half a Life begins with her family’s move to California as a child. Much of the narrative is consumed by her depictions of her father, Herbert. Herbert was most likely on the autism spectrum and had extreme difficulties connecting with others, including (or especially) his family. He had a neurotic fear of spending money on anything, and flew into a frenzy when anything was wasted, a burden he placed squarely on the shoulders of his wife and children.
If, for instance, somebody in the house finished the last of the peaches, he would loudly complain, to no one in particular,
What happened to the goddamn peaches?… Sure, sure, the kids ate the peaches. Lord high-and-mighty Jack does nothing around here, doesn’t do a goddamn thing to help his father, but he eats his father’s peaches. Does she care? Noooooo. She probably encourages the kids. She probably hides peaches all over their goddamn rooms. Why the hell can’t there be peaches?
Once, when he discovered that Jill’s mother, Gloria, bought their oldest son, Jack, an electric guitar, he pushed him to the ground and sat on him. Then, rocking himself back and forth (with his son still underneath him) he would ask, “Is she trying to ruin me? Oh God, she’s trying to ruin me. That’s it, isn’t it? She’s trying to ruin me.”
Gloria spends years desiring to be free of him. Eventually, she makes up her mind and demands that he leave. Struggling with money, Gloria, Jack, and Jill find work with a woman, Mrs. McCaffrey, who runs a small market research firm, handing out surveys in a mall. Soon, Jill and Jack begin working with Mrs. McCaffrey’s competitor Lenny. Lenny was stiff competition, mostly because approximately half of all the surveys he delivered to clients he filled out himself. Jill spends her days in malls passing out surveys—and the rest of her time forging them. Lenny had a slick and energetic personality. He lied for fun, fought with mall managers for soliciting without their approval, and squandered money recklessly, giving Jill $50 bonuses at random.
Lenny was unpredictable. As Ciment writes, at one moment Lenny would call Jill “his little protégé” and other times he would say she looked like a slut and was bringing down his image. In spite of all this, Jill and Lenny make a decent team, and Lenny always has something for Jill to do. However, Jill worries that she is wasting her potential and that she will be working with Lenny for the rest of her life. Each time she tries to quit, Lenny degrades her, pleads with her, and bribes her (often in that order) until she agrees to stay.
Having a natural talent for painting, Jill signs up for art classes. There, she meets her teacher and future husband, Arnold. Jill becomes enamored by Arnold and eventually she approaches him after class in his studio with the intent to sleep with him. Given her young age and the fact that he is married with two kids, he politely turns her down.
Desperate to get away and make a name for herself in the art world, she abruptly decides to travel to New York with no way to support herself. Without a place to stay, Jill calls the only one she knows in the city, a friend of Lenny’s. This friend connects her to his niece, Yvette, who agrees to rent Jill some space in her apartment. Once there, Jill earns money as a nude model in a “photography” studio called Escapades. Unable to continue paying her rent, and with Yvette becoming increasingly irritable and unstable, Jill calls her friend Rachel, who tells her that she can stay in her grandparents’ apartment while they are away. Jill lives in their apartment in solitude until she eventually calls her mother and asks her if she can send her enough money for her to return home, telling her that she “was tired of the New York art scene.”
Back in California, Jill worries about her future. She looks at different art colleges, though all of them require a high school and SAT transcript. Jill performed especially poorly in high school, and could not understand the study materials for the SAT. To get accepted, she told the admissions office at the university she wanted to apply to that her high school transcripts were lost. Then she forged her friend Rachel’s name on her SAT forms and asked her to take the test for her, to which she agreed.
Jill returns to Arnold attempting to seduce him for the second time. She succeeds, and they sleep together. Believing that it was then Arnold’s turn to do the courting, she waits anxiously for him to call, to no avail. She becomes despondent, scarcely reacting when Rachel calls to tell her she aced her SAT. Finally, she received a letter from Arnold that read, “Dear Jill, Are you ever coming back to class? Please call.” When she asked him why he didn’t call, she found out that he felt apprehensive about reaching out to her, and didn’t want her mother to find out they had slept together. To help him feel more comfortable about calling her, Jill suggests that he call using the name “Sheldon” in case her mother or one of her brothers answers. She then tells her family that “Sheldon” is actually her 47-year-old art teacher, Arnold, with whom she is having an affair, and that if he calls, it’s for her.
Needing money for college, she takes more work from Lenny, though soon her car is stolen. Uninsured, losing her car puts a major hitch on her future plans, and she begs her father for a loan. He awkwardly refuses, feigning poverty. Jill asks again, this time demanding he loan her the money. Still unwilling, he begins insulting her in the third person, saying, “What does that daughter of mine want from me? Does she think I’m made of money? … I’ll teach that good-for-nothing daughter of mine a little responsibility in this life.” Enraged, Jill takes her mother’s leather thong and begins strangling her father with it until Jack enters the room and stops her. Herbert gets off the floor, panting for breath, and says “I must have fallen.” Without a word, the three of them decide never to speak of this.
The memoir ends soon after Jill enters university and Arnold leaves his wife for her. The rest of the pages are occupied by her adult memories of her father, with whom she awkwardly tries to keep in touch, until his death.
Happily Ever After?
Half a Life is a relatively enjoyable memoir. Though disjointed, it is a funny and engaging story of a scrappy and ambitious young woman fighting for what she wants. Of course, given that Ciment only had one novel under her belt at the time, it’s uncertain what its intended market might have been. That is one problem Consent does not suffer from. With #MeToo plastered across each article written about the book, Ciment has found the proper genre for her life. However, it is not that simple. Although she litters her memoir with a slew of sinister insinuations, Ciment never actually accuses Arnold of anything. Instead, Consent reads like a “choose your own adventure novel,” wherein the author lays out all of the ingredients needed for a gothic tale of grooming and sexual exploitation at the hands of an older art teacher, and allows the reader to construct it for themselves.
Making the not-so-original observation that memory is not an objective recollection of facts, but a narrative process of turning experience into meaning, Ciment decides to challenge her original rendition of events in Half a Life from the vantage point of the #MeToo movement, asking a series of highly provocative questions including, “Did the art teacher’s behavior…qualify as child grooming?” “When I wrote this, was I protecting Arnold?” “Did I have the agency to consent?” “Does a kiss in one moment mean something else entirely five decades later?” and “Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself?”
For her part, Ciment has nothing but loving things to say about her husband. At the same time she accepts (and imagines the reader does also) the current cultural depiction of women as rendered infantile in the face of male power, as well as the validity of statutory rape laws as representing absolute moral boundries. Ciment—never doubting that #MeToo possesses the incontrovertible truth of female experience—ransacks through her mind in search of subtle ways she might have painted Arnold in a more faultless light.
In a confusing way, Ciment also feels compelled to defend Arnold from the reader, even as she conducts her own full scale investigation into his moral character. For instance, describing a creative period in both of their lives during the beginning of their marriage, Ciment writes, “Where did Arnold get his energy? From me, of course. But please don’t equate this with an old vampire drinking a maiden’s lifeblood.” Not fearing that this odd metaphor would be akin to writing “don’t think about elephants,” Ciment found it necessary to negate this image, assuming that it had inevitably appeared in the reader’s mind.
At times it appears that the reader has more control over the text than the author, with Ciment seemingly always trying to predict at which point readers will start cracking jokes about her life, so that she can beat them to the punchline, as evinced, for example, by the frequent references to Lolita, such as her worrying that a vacation with her and Arnold would “read like a reenactment of Humbert Humbert and Lolita’s cross-country road trip.”
…
As a part of her attempt to write herself a #MeToo account without ever having to cast anyone as her abuser, Ciment includes her own Humbert Humbert into the book about halfway through with a scene that did not make it into her first memoir. It was around the year 1970, and after Jill introduces Arnold to her family, the camera slowly shifts to Jill’s two younger brothers Tom (13) and Pete (7). Tom had a neighbor friend named Lance, and Lance’s father, Burt, took them on numerous outings to waterparks and such, with Pete included.
Eventually, it comes out that Burt had molested Pete. Ciment describes the “hunt” for Burt in lurid detail. It begins when Ciment’s mother calls him in the middle of the night expressing her desire for him to be raped and beaten in prison, and telling him that if she didn’t believe he was suffering enough, she would hire inmates to blind him. This alerts him that he is being investigated, and he flees.
Finally, Ciment throws open the curtains to fully reveal Burt’s ghastly predilections and his heroic capture by the police:
He belonged to a national “community” of pedophiles, a predecessor to NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association. Despite the name, most of Burt’s ring did not necessarily prefer one sex over the other.
Childhood was their victims’ only commonality. Girls couldn’t get pregnant, so what was the harm? Burt and twenty-eight other men had pooled their money and rented a four-bedroom house in a Chatsworth subdivision near the entrance of Box Canyon…During the raid, police found hundreds of magazines (Bambino Sex, Lollitots, Baby Love, Nudist Moppets)…Burt and nine others were swept up during the raid. He tried to escape out a bathroom window but surrendered when the police gave chase.
The detectives tell Gloria that Burt would likely get a sentence of 10-to-13 years, and assure her “It’s a life sentence for a pervert in prison.” Ciment brings out the irony of asking her middle-age boyfriend to comfort her, and the suspicious looks the police officers gave to Arnold in consequence of his unexplained relationship to the family. Ciment writes,
He [Arnold] remembered the way the two detectives exchanged glances. The coincidence of two older men involved with the children of this household alarmed them. Did it alarm Arnold? Sleeping with a willing seventeen-year-old is in no way analogous to child molestation, yet he must have been aware that he, like Burt, had benefited from the vulnerability of fatherless children.
Of course, as for Pete, he remains entirely voiceless. We learn the effect this ordeal had on Tom, Jill, and especially Gloria, who appeared to have been the most traumatized out of the whole family combined. However, we hear nothing from Pete himself, and are given only the usual tripe: his innocence destroyed, his trust broken, his childhood gone, etc.
After this, Pete is never heard from again, showing up on stage only in order to get molested before vanishing forever. For some reason, Ciment could not find a way to squeeze this event into her first memoir, which makes it unclear how it managed to wind up in this one, given that Consent is hardly concerned with Jill’s family life to begin with. It’s possible that this scene was thrown in as an offering to readers, providing their righteous indignation with a lure to chase down like greyhounds, so as to relieve them of the obligation of questioning whether their morals are sound for desiring to see pedophiles tortured in prison on the off chance this book was raising doubts in their minds.
Matters of the Heart
Despite the title of this memoir, Ciment never offers any definition of consent or what it might consist of, only that it seems to mimic different levels of security clearance, whereby those without proper authorization must stay with the space allowed to them. Writing as though these moral boundaries are founded on the very laws of nature, she checks to see what neuroscience has to say about their first kiss:
I fervently kissed him back. I had imagined his kiss ever since he looked down my blouse. But did I have the agency to consent? The teenage brain is impulsive. There is a mismatch between the limbic system, which is the center of emotion, and the prefrontal lobe, which controls logic and reasoning.
By the end of the book, it still remains unclear just how burly one’s prefrontal lobe must become before a person can begin to make autonomous decisions, nor the difference between an overactive limbic system and the experience of falling in love.
Either way, Ciment is assured she now has the capacity to correctly appraise events in ways her younger self could not, especially when gender politics is concerned. For example, at one point she recounts her experiences in college and describes a course she took on human sexuality. This class began with each student announcing what aroused them that week, and ended with a session of solitary masturbation with the lights off. Around that same time, she became involved with a feminist consciousness-raising group which entailed (among other things) the women looking at their own wombs with a mirror. Ciment writes, “I had no desire to see my own cervix. The idea seemed distasteful to me in a way that group masturbation wasn’t.” From there, Ciment goes on to explains,
There are two voices in every memoir: old and young. For the previous scene, I employed the young voice by doing one simple trick. I took reflection out of the equation. The young voice doesn’t reflect; it just reacts. Take these two sentences: ‘I had no desire to see my own cervix. The idea seemed distasteful to me in a way that group masturbation wasn’t.’The old voice might have stopped the narrative to ask why group masturbation was more acceptable than womb gazing.The old voice might have posited the answer: In 1971, what was sexually distasteful was adjudicated by men.
The old voice is enlightened, competent, and dependable; the young voice is naive, deluded, and foolish. According to Ciment, it was acceptable to have women masturbate in class because a man authorized it, regardless of the fact that every religious conservative, every moral traditionalist, every father would have gone into a rage after hearing of this professor’s sexual depravity. Yet somehow, his male power was so invincible it was able to cancel out the male power of the rest of the country. As for why Ciment didn’t want to look at her cervix in 1971? Again, the answer is men, of course. No need to unpack this idea any further—it’s coming directly from Ciment’s prefrontal lobe.
…
Ciment does not, however, consider Arnold to have played a part in this vague male conspiracy and instead portrays him in a thoroughly multidimensional light. Arnold Mesches was born to Jewish immigrant parents a few years before the Great Depression. He hoped to be a social realist painter, but before his career could take off, the Red Scare came. This made paintings that depicted the plight of the working class dangerous to buy, and even more dangerous to paint (the FBI had a 760-page dossier on his political activities). Abstract art then became fashionable, an art form that Arnold found pointless.
He opened an art school where he taught for over a decade before meeting Jill. Ciment writes, “his studio, what had looked to me, at sixteen, like a laboratory of experimentation, looked to him, at forty-seven, like a diorama of failure.” Ciment draws a comparison between herself and Pygmalion: She created Arnold as the exemplar of her ideal man and watched him turn human in front of her. For example, she recalls once working in the assistant dean’s office in college, typing names on rejection letters for artists who applied for teaching positions, when she saw that one of these names was Arnold’s.
A few years into their marriage, Arnold began painting again, and they traveled to New York (where they eventually settled) to present his work to a gallery. This gallerist praised the photos and wanted to see the paintings up close. When she and Arnold finally met in person, she said, “Can I be completely honest with you?…When my assistant showed me your images last summer, I told her, ‘This kid is really going somewhere.’ You’re too old to invest in.”
Ciment portrays the way her feelings of adoration for Arnold gradually turned into feelings of mutual trust and companionship. For instance, while in New York, Arnold soon attracted a cadre of young artists who admired him in a similar way as Jill did, including a 24-year-old art dealer who soon contracted AIDS. When he found out that he was no longer permitted to use the local pool, Arnold went back with him. Ciment recalls the dying young man leaning on Arnold for support as they jumped in together, and writes, “I never loved Arnold more.”
…
After this scene, Ciment decides too many pages have gone by without mentioning that Arnold was a statutory rapist, so she remedies this. Returning once again to their first kiss, Ciment struggles to remember who kissed who first. In Half a Life, she stated that she kissed him first, but now she thinks that it might have been he who kissed her. Ignoring the fact that several weeks previously she tried to throw herself at him, and he turned her down, who actually leaned in the first time their lips touched is given profound significance, determining “who was the transgressor and who the transgressed.” She writes,
How do I convey yearning for a kiss while at the same time acknowledge the predatory act of an older man kissing a teenager? Perhaps had I been the type of writer who peeked at her characters through the keyhole, I would have seen a middle-aged man kissing an underage girl. I might have been repelled by what I saw and written a different scene. But I was inside the girl, yearning for the kiss.
Of course, the fact that there might not have been anything “predatory” about Arnold in the first place never occurs as a viable alternative. Instead she takes it as a foundational truth that their difference in age alone made their relationship coercive. At the same time, she describes their marriage as committed and fulfilling. While there were challenges, it seems on average to have been a better marriage than most.
It appears then that Consent should not be considered a single memoir, but rather two very distinct ones—in two different genres—stitched together in a single book. One memoir tells the story of a lecherous teacher taking advantage of a vulnerable, needy teenage girl without a father figure. The second is the bittersweet story of a passionate May-December romance, with one partner having to watch her lover grow weaker and die while she is still in her prime. Moreover, either of these stories interact with one another for more than a page or two at a time.
Ambivalence is one thing, but that doesn’t seem to characterize Consent. She does not doubt Arnold—never expressing that she personally felt coerced by him or violated. She only accepts #MeToo, and with such gusto that she felt compelled to write about her marriage for the second time, only now with ghoulish references to child groomers and sex predators that leap out randomly from the text as in a haunted house ride.
Could the changing demand in the book market—the stories people want to be told—have had anything to do with Ciment’s decision to write Consent? Ciment suggests that as a result of the changing social climate, this memoir had to have been written:
I didn’t ask then, but I have to ask now that Arnold is no longer here to sway or dispute me. Was my marriage—the half century of intimacy, the shifting power, the artistic collaborations, the sex, the shared meals, the friends, the travels, the illnesses, the money worries, the houses, the dogs—fruit from the poisonous tree?
However, her marriage with a 30-year age gap is not the only thing left over from Half a Life that may have equally warranted a reconsideration. For instance, she might have given some more thought about her father, considering what we now know about autism and the difficulty of managing it alone. Or, she could have added more detail about her decision to forge her SAT scores on her college application, given how expensive college has become, and how vital it is for one’s future. Or, she could have gone back to that one time when she almost strangled her father to death, in light of shifting social attitudes towards attempted homicide. Perhaps in another 25 years, after the next trendy social movement has begun, Ciment will treat us to a third memoir for yet another reinterpretation of her life.