Consent: A Memoir

by Jill Ciment

The teenage brain is impulsive. There is a mismatch between the limbic system, which is the center of emotion, and the prefrontal lobe, which controls logic and reasoning.

Calling myself a victim would imply that I had been helpless, whereas calling myself a survivor would suggest I had empowerment.

Having a secret that someone else wants is powerful.

I didn’t yet know how to explain to the group that his age was my aphrodisiac, that I needed to be desired by someone older and important so that I could feel special.

Doesn’t becoming a great artist require a constant variety of new sexual partners? It did for all the male artists.

In writing, negative space is silence, what is not said.

Its absence creates form, proportion, and dimensionality.

A story stops when the writer doesn’t know what to say next; it ends when there is nothing more to be said.

pushing paint around without the goal of creating imagery felt pointless. He couldn’t let go of the belief that art had something to teach—empathy, humility; otherwise it was only decoration.

It finally sank in: To love wasn’t just to feel love, but to act lovingly.

“After so many years, it’s not losing the man that matters,” they had all agreed, “it’s losing the life.”

Wasn’t groupie culture just statutory rape?

Do children feel the same disquieting and inexplicable culpability that date rape victims do? You dressed up for him, you let him hold your hand, you let him take you to Disneyland.

The taller of the two gave her the name of a counselor who specialized in sexually abused children. “You’re lucky Pete is a boy,” he told my mother as he was leaving. “Boys are always believed. Not that the girls aren’t, it just takes longer.”

Color is the language of dreams, according to Cézanne.

when a man stood beside a woman, especially an older man and a younger woman, the woman became invisible, except as an object of acquisition.

Was newness the point of art? Experimentation? Cleverness? Shock? Was it the artist’s duty to rush ahead of humanity and report back from the future? If there was an advance guard, were we at war? Who was the enemy?

His unshakable confidence in my intellect quieted my terrors.

I knew. I had never wanted children. I had known this about myself ever since I was a child, as another child might know she is gay.

Nudity is different than nakedness. To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others.

How do you comfort someone when the source of their anguish is inconceivable to you?

I know I feel responsibility for her and sorrow, but is that the same as love?”