false http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171447678m/99575.jpg 99575 2 Unflinchingly honest, moving, and funny, <i>Half a Life</i> 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.<br><br>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. <br><br>By turns comic, tragic, and heartrending, <i>Half a Life</i> 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. 95999 1996 Half a Life total:18|5:3|4:1|3:8|2:6| 18 55 34 1 99575 0385488912 9780385488914 18 1 3.06 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171447678m/99575.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99575.Half_a_Life 0 0 false Sat Sep 20 11:44:03 -0700 2008 Sat Sep 20 11:45:51 -0700 2008 99575 0385488912 9780385488914 18 1 3.06 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171447678m/99575.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99575.Half_a_Life 0 0 false Mon Nov 09 11:59:29 -0800 2009 Mon Nov 09 11:59:29 -0800 2009 99575 0385488912 9780385488914 18 1 3.06 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-0800 2009 1340791 0517701715 9780517701713 0 0 3.06 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1182864377m/1340791.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1340791.Half_a_Life 0 0 false Thu Mar 05 08:15:21 -0800 2009 Thu Mar 05 08:15:21 -0800 2009 99575 0385488912 9780385488914 18 1 3.06 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171447678m/99575.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99575.Half_a_Life 0 0 false Wed Jan 28 13:08:11 -0800 2009 Wed Jan 28 13:08:11 -0800 2009 99575 0385488912 9780385488914 18 1 3.06 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171447678m/99575.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99575.Half_a_Life 5 0 false Fri Dec 05 19:21:18 -0800 2008 Fri Dec 05 19:21:24 -0800 2008 99575 0385488912 9780385488914 18 1 3.06 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171447678m/99575.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99575.Half_a_Life 0 0 false Thu Oct 30 18:34:58 -0700 2008 Thu Oct 30 18:34:58 -0700 2008 99575 0385488912 9780385488914 18 1 3.06 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171447678m/99575.jpg 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