Half a Life, by Jill Ciment
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Half a Life, by Jill Ciment
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Jill Ciment weaves an unforgettable tale of survival, compassion, and courage, in this haunting recollection of a child surrounded by confusion and madness, and her struggle to find an identity. Half a Life traces Jill Ciment's family from Toronto to the California desert - -a landscape and culture so alien to her father that the last vestiges of sanity leave him. As madness engulfs him he becomes increasingly brutal and the family, grasping at survival, throws him out the door. Having no understanding that he has done anything wrong, he first lives in his car at the end of the driveway, waiting to be invited back in, before exiting completely from their lives.Poor and fatherless, Ciment spends the years from age fourteen to seventeen, as a gang girl, a professional forger, a stripper, a corporate spy, and finally, a high school dropout who by age eighteen has seduced her art teacher, a man nearly three decades her senior and bluffed her way into college in an effort to shape a future. Ciment is cutting, insightful and clearly unapologetic as she details the confusion and bravado of a child heroine whose dreams and tenacity allow her finally, to create the life she has been so desperately seeking.
Half a Life, by Jill Ciment- Amazon Sales Rank: #994038 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-06-17
- Released on: 2015-06-17
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly Bitter poverty and disordered family life thrust Jill Ciment out into the mean streets of the world long before she reached adulthood. By 18, she had already been a shoplifter, porno model, gang member, forger and seductress. Growing up in the 1960s on the periphery of an upscale neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, she was the archetypal outsider, shunned by the girls she yearned to be like, a sister to her mother and a would-be murderer of her selfish father. More often a truant than a student, she couldn't spell and didn't read until she was an adult. What saved her was a talent for drawing, her toughness and good luck. With these, she turned herself into the somebody that life had seemed to ordain she would not become: loved, loving and productive. In her writing (Small Claims), she is true to her own honest and engaging self. Tender, unsentimental and filled with moments of contagious joy and heartbreak, her "half a life" is more than most people experience in a lifetime. Author tour. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal Novelist Ciment (The Law of Falling Bodies, LJ 2/15/93) takes an unflinching look at the first half of her life. Her approach is straightforward, spare, and laced with ironic humor. When she was in her teens, life with her father, an angry, manic man, grew intolerable, and the family forced him to leave. Poor and frightened, but tough and hard-headed, Ciment drifted on the fringes of respectability, using her wits and grit to get along. Among her rescuers were her gutsy, resourceful mother and her art teacher/lover, a man 30 years her senior. As she ends her memoir, Ciment recalls the final months of her estranged father's life. What is revealed are the longing and compassion of a grown daughter coming to terms with a father who was incapable of nurturing her. This incisive, moving autobiography, written without pretense, brings to mind Mary Karr's The Liar's Club (LJ 6/1/95). Recommended for most libraries.?Carol Ann McAllister, Coll. of William & Mary Lib., Williamsburg, Va.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews A bare-bones narrative of a brash girl growing up in Los Angeles in the turbulent 1960s, determined to overcome her father's painful neglect. Novelist Ciment (The Law of Falling Bodies, 1993) looks back on her adolescence without pity and without judgment. She recounts years spent breaking into cars and houses, shoplifting, forging, and cutting school in a dry, deadpan tone that suits L.A.'s desert atmosphere. She, her mother, and her three brothers eke out a precarious living when her mother forces her emotionally and financially stingy father to leave. This bad girl who can barely spell has only one real interest--art. Despite a 30-year age difference, she becomes infatuated with Arnold, her married art teacher. (Curiously, Ciment never comments on the possibility that she may be searching for a father figure.) Seventeen in 1970, and desperate to escape L.A., Ciment scrapes up money to move to New York City. After posing nude at a sleazy ``modeling agency,'' she is overwhelmed by loneliness that sends her reeling back home, where she and Arnold consummate their affair and start living together. She gets into art school on the strength of her portfolio and a friend's willingness to take the SAT for her. Flash forward to 1986: Ciment (now a writer) and Arnold are living in New York when she receives a letter from her father--his first overture in years. The two guardedly reconcile, and she visits him in the hospital. When he dies soon after, she seems to grieve, not for him, but for what might have been, had he been a better father. This flawed but compelling memoir lacks a deeper level of introspection and a fuller sense of the Ciment family, but the author is a triumphantly self-made woman and her book gives us the agony--and intermittent joy--of the process in tough, spare, convincing language. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful. read it in one sitting By Nancey E. Carroll I read this book in a single afternoon, devouring it. The words, visuals that Jill Ciment (sounds like concrete) uses are fantastic. So real. What a true voice. It DOES read like fiction. I had to keep remembering that this really happened to the face on the cover. A real person went through the hell that was her father and home-life. A disturbing childhood, disturbing pre-adulthood. But fabulous story. Read this one!.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful. Are you interested in serious writing? By A Customer While there are many reasons why this book might appeal to readers, the writing itself makes it de rigeur for everyone. It is a memoir but it is so highly structured that it at times reads like fiction. If you are interested in California, family histories, or just feeling like you are in the midst of something that you can't put down, I highly recommend this book
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. A breezy story of 60's/70's teenage poverty in Los Angeles By Mary McGreevey Jill Ciment is born into a secular Jewish family in Montreal, with three brothers. Her mother has no job skills and her father is a basket case in confronting the work world and the adult male burden of supporting a large family and unemployed wife. He is timid, very introverted, afraid of the world, absorbed for hours in gardening, neglecting not only his own financial future but that of his children and his own future. He hates his job(s) and barely survives. He abhors spending money, because every dollar the kids would like to spend represent his participating in a work world he cannot mentally abide. His stinginess and increasing reclusiveness from the world and his family ultimately leads to a divorce, after the family has left an extended-family-nest in freezing Montreal to start anew in roasting sunny Southern California. Suffice to say, it's a nightmare for all involved, and we are blessed with this autobiography by the only daughter, Jill, who was about eight or nine when coming into awareness of her family's terrible financial fragility.When the father is kicked out by the unhinged, late-in-life pregnancy and fourth-child burdened mother, things really start to fall apart. The father lives alone in a motel room, pays minimal alimony, and the mother cannot even make mortgage payments on the cheap house they found in a far-back Valley settlement.The story is full of interesting details about struggling to survive as a single Mom in much more sexist times than now. The mother, never educated or previously employed, takes ridiculous and low-paying jobs selling clothing on the street, paid piecemeal at about $10/day. Now Jill and her brother Jack have to step up to bat to help the family stay afloat, and both begin to scrounge for any work they can lay their hands on. Common enough in those days that white teenagers would look for and find badly-paid parttime jobs, more so than today, so it is not so much humiliating as just plain exhausting to be a student and work these silly jobs to buy groceries. Jack, the elder brother, is self-absorbed and eggheaded, to use an old expression, so he withdraws mostly into his own world. Later in life he comes to the point that he lectures on Neuroscience! Jill takes things much more to heart and suffers for mother, father and brothers. I have to say, no matter how any American female did grow up in those days, that reader would find the everyday details of consumption and status an interesting flashback. That is the main reason I did pick up the book (discarded at the library)since I am just a few years younger than Jill Ciment.As Jill and her family continues to flounder about, the mother mostly with lousy jobs and even more lousy men, Jill does better and better with a gay sleazeball marketer who's happy to hire a young desperate female teen to scavenge for market research responses at supermarkets and parking lots. Jill jumps into it because he hands her a lot of ready cash and gives her a nice lifestyle she'd never have on her own: staying in hotels, eating in restaurants, flying around the country to the new giant malls where the marketers pay her boss handsomely to see if people do or do not like Swanson dinner, and if not, why not?She can buy herself an old MG for $800 and get around. She cuts classes endlessly and forges notes from her mother, as well as signatures on report cards. She makes up data of interviews for the marketer and he agrees, if even 50% of the data comes from real folks on the streets, it doesn't matter anyway. The point is to get paid and pay he does. So the time passes with her teen years working away at illegitimate research, forging freely and happily all kinds of documents, and losing any kind of moral compass. The mother sympathizes and understands, use chutzpah as best she can, but can hardly fuss over the four kids.She's busy.So here's the part of the book, later chapters: I was genuinely shocked to learn that Jill Ciment had a brainy and rich friend take her SAT for her, getting her top scores, and with that trick alone got into the California School of the Arts with a scholarship, although she hadn't been attending high school or completing any classes in advance. First of all, it's downright wrong and challenges all of what any hardworking kid ever thinks of academic qualifications. Secondly, she does not give the SAT score. Most importantly, thirdly, how could she wing any college courses having no serious preparation at all? How could her SAT scores be skyhigh when she was so ill-educated? Didn't her professors question this? Perhaps art schools were airy-fairy, but that was a good school, hard to get into. Didn't any smart administrator wonder at all that kids could cheat on their SAT's? Ciment has no remorse: She carried it off undetected, did finally hit the books in college, and was already throwing herself into the art world as an artist and artist's lover by this time. In fact, she had moved into the art professor's life, although he was married with kids, and by sleeping with him as an underage student, got him hooked and away from his wife, then they started their own life together. He's in his fifties, she's in her late teens, but hey!It worked, and they're still married. That legitimizes all of this shenanigans. She is now a lecturer and writer on art, check the Net.I can only say, when these books about youthful struggle gloss over the reality of their solutions, the book in the end falls flat. We want to cheer her and her family on, to hope that they succeed. But how do they? How does the mother find decent work in the end, or does she just remarry and live off another man? How does Jill make money, or is she just now going through art classes and living off her lover who pays the bills? Is that an accomplishment, to live off others, rack up diplomas, and declare one's self a success, even though one did it by cheating and not by one's own work?Her own father seemed to be struggling and living cheap until his end, which is covered in the final chapters. He's miserable and lonely and ever the cheapskate due to sheer fear - never mind that his Montreal family left him money.What this really boils down to, as in the book TERRITORY OF MEN by a similar woman, is that cheating and getting a fellow to marry you to pay your bills is the best way to success. Alas, if that were true, how did Ciment's mother get herself into such a bad situation with her four kids anyway? Wrong man, ach!!!! What had started out with promise and hope fell into poverty!If there is any moral to this book, sad and cynical as this story is, it seems that men and their financial success are really EVERYONE's lynchpin. Pull out that person's ability to earn money, and people all around go tumbling down until they latch onto another man's wallet and new mealticket.Am I wrong? Readers, respond, or author, what say you? Was Obama right to mess around in high school with the Choom Gang, then get into Columbia by affirmative action (i.e. more cheating of the usual type), and then say it is alright because he got elected President? I don't think so. But then, my ideas don't come from modern America.
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