Half a Life: A Memoir

By Jill Ciment

Book Overview

Unflinchingly honest, moving, and funny, Half a Life shows how a girl without means or promise and with only a loving mother, chutzpah, a bit of fraud, and a lot of luck turned into somebody. In 1964 the Ciment family left middle-class Montreal for the fringe desert communities of Los Angeles, where their always unstable father lost the last vestiges of his sanity. Terrified and broke, in a world he could neither understand nor control, he came apart. When the family finally threw him out, he lived for weeks in his car at the foot of their driveway. Ciment turned herself into a girl for whom a father is unnecessary-a tough girl who survived any way she could. She and her brother Jack helped support the family by working for a shady market researcher, quickly learning to supply their own answers to burning questions like, "Did we like Swanson TV dinners? If so, why? On a scale of one to ten, how would we rate the new Talking Barbie? Arrow wax? Dr. Ross's dog food?" She became a gang girl, a professional forger, and a Times Square porn model. Using a friend's SAT score she cheated her way into art school, and seduced and eventually married her art teacher, a married man thirty years her senior. By turns comic, tragic, and heartrending, Half a Life is a bold, unsentimental portrait of the artist as a girl from nowhere, making herself up from scratch, acting up, and finally overcoming the consequences of being the child of a father incapable of love and responsibility.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385488912
• ISBN13: 9780385488914
• Release Date: August 1997
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A memoir that parallels mine

Many of the accounts in her memoir parallel mine. Living in the San Fernando Valley, having a strange father, going to NY to be an artist, and going to art school. In fact, I took several of her creative writing classes while at art school and felt a connection with her artistic sensibilities but at the time she hadn't published any books yet. 20 years later her name pops in my head and I do a search and find she has several books under her belt. I am looking forward to reading her novels.

Very Enjoyable Memoir

I flew this book and felt very satisfied at the end. Ciment tells us just the right amount about her childhood to help us understand the sometimes bizarre and devious adventures she survived. Ciment did a great job, too, of throwing in appropiate historical and cultural markers. Worth reading!

read it in one sitting

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!.

Are you interested in serious writing?

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