Half a Life [Paperback]

Jill Ciment (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 18, 1997

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.

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 220 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (August 18, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385488912
• ISBN-13: 978-0385488914
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.5 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,205,260 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jill Ciment was born in Montreal, Canada. She is the author of Small Claims, a collection of short stories and novellas; The Law of Falling Bodies, Teeth of the Dog, The Tattoo Artist, and Heroic Measures, novels; and Half a Life, a memoir. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts, a NEA Japan Fellowship Prize, two New York State Fellowships for the Arts, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Ciment is a professor at the University of Florida. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars read it in one sitting, August 3, 1998

By 

Nancey E. Carroll - See all my reviews

This review is from: Half a Life (Paperback)

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!.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Are you interested in serious writing?, March 31, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Half a Life (Hardcover)

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

4.0 out of 5 stars I liked this memoir more near the very end of it., October 15, 2009

By 

Barb F. - See all my reviews

This review is from: Half a Life (Paperback)

The first 1/4 of the book was very good. Then the next almost 1/2 of the book wasn't nearly as good, But when I got to the last 1/4 or so it got very good again. I am very glad that I stuck with it until the very end. The part I liked the most were the last 50 pages or so. That is when the memoir really started to take shape for me.

Reading about the relationship the author had with her father sounded oh so familiar..very much like my relationship I have with my own father..slowly slipping away. And when you reflect on that you see that more time has gone by without you being really aware of just how long it has been!

I will look at the authors works of fiction and see if I am moved to read any of them.