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Half a Life (Paperback: Anchor Books: 224 pages)

Half a Life
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Product Details: Half a Life

Author:Jill Ciment, Jill Ciment
Format:Paperback: Anchor Books: 224 pages.
Publisher:Anchor (09/01/1997)
ISBN:0385488912
ISBN13:9780385488914
Reading Level:

Pro Reviews: Half a Life

  • Enhanced Muze Note

    ...[T]he 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.

  • Enhanced Muze Note

    It's no surprise to learn that Jill Ciment, the author of this luminous memoir, once studied to be a painter. Sad, funny, and affecting, 'Half a Life' is animated by reminiscences that are so emotionally detailed, so physically well observed that they burn an image in the reader's memory, like paintings glimpsed at an exhibition.

Publisher Notes: Half a Life

  • 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.

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