Half a Life

By Jill Ciment

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0517701715
• ISBN13: 9780517701713
• Release Date: June 1996
• Publisher: Crown
• Length: 210 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 1.0" x 5.8"

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