CONSENT

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.