Half a Life [Hardcover]

Jill Ciment (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 18, 1996

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.

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.

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 210 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1st edition (June 18, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0517701715
• ISBN-13: 978-0517701713
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,862,275 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.