Consent: A Memoir

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.

JILL CIMENT, the author, most recently, of the novel The Body in Question (a New York Times Notable Book), has been the recipient of numerous honors, among them a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Ciment, a professor emeritus at the University of Florida, was born in Montreal, Canada; she now lives in Gainesville and New York City.

ISBN: 9780593701065
Format: Hardback
Pages: 160
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: June 11, 2024

“Frank, provocative and deeply compelling.” —People

“Remarkable . . . at once forthright, thoughtful, and moving. . . . This is a book poised to fuel plenty of discussion.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR

“Arresting. . . . Bold. . . . Ciment has given readers a brave and beautiful variant on the #MeToo memoir.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR Fresh Air

“Enthralling. . . . In Consent, Ciment revisits what she wrote back [in Half a Life], re-scrutinizes the memories she tapped and the story she built from them, and then brings the history of her marriage.” —Slate

“Early in Consent Ciment asks whether her marriage was all ‘fruit from the poisonous tree.’ It is a daring question, and she is unsentimental and unflinching enough to answer it convincingly, which is to say, complexly. She shrinks from nothing in her accounting: not from Arnold’s sordid advances, not from her teenage naiveté, not from the many indignities of her situation. Nor does she shrink from the most scandalous surprise of all: the possibility of a love forceful enough to overturn the habitual hierarchies.” —Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post