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.

In this unflinching account of the ardent love affair between Jill Ciment and her painting teacher, which began in the 1970s when she was a teenager and he was married with two children, she not only reflects on how their love ignited (who leaned in first for that kiss?) but interrogates her 1990s memoir on the subject, Half a Life. Ciment asks herself if she told the whole truth back then and what truth looked like to her in that 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, Ciment reexplores 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: 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.