Consent: A Memoir

by Jill Ciment

What writer wouldn’t employ the irony of sleeping in your absent father’s bed after trying to seduce your father substitute?

The point of view in a memoir is curious. The writer must trick the reader (and herself) into believing that she actually remembers how she felt decades ago.

I was the only sugar baby I knew who lived with a sugar daddy without sugar.

I no longer believe in withholding something just because it is obvious. Clichés become clichés because they are true.

She had no idea who I was but pretended to recognize me. At the same time, she was suspicious as to why a stranger was in her house. That was how my father saw me.

These were the days before pharmacological fixes, so no one had any choice but to talk and talk and talk until the demons got bored and left on their own. Therapy, like communism, was an evangelical passion, and Arnold was no exception. Since I couldn’t afford psychoanalysis, he became my de facto therapist.

When someone asks you about your future, it is make-believe, science fiction. But when someone asks you about your past, your story becomes a mystery.

E, by the way, never made it into the memoir.

I did not say I love you back. Declaring love for someone other than my family seemed a bigger rupture between childhood and adulthood than losing my virginity.

Arnold was having an affair. I was going steady.

Why wouldn’t he just tell E and his wife that he had fallen in love with someone else? I did not say, with another woman. I did not yet think of myself as a woman.

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.

Where are the loving descriptions of his body, the object of my mad desire?

(If you leave your wife for another woman, you might horse-trade for the better car, but if you leave your wife for a teenager, you take only your toothbrush.)

Two Father Times massaging four young feet in a geisha establishment. It was too depressing to contemplate.

My ambition was to have my art immortalized one day on a slide in an art history lecture—even though it was evident from the artists listed on the syllabi that women need not apply.

The young voice doesn’t reflect; it just reacts.

For male narrators, the bildungsroman traditionally ends with the hero about to embark on his avocation, be it sexual conquests or working with lepers. For female protagonists, the bildungsroman classically ends in marriage.

To love wasn’t just to feel love, but to act lovingly.

Arnold bolted into laughter, too, but his laughter was like the rider who gallops alongside the frantic animal and tries to catch the loose reins.

It should have been so obvious that something bad was going to happen to my little brother.

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. Or was the rupture from childhood so seismic that he would not understand how it reconfigured him until years afterward?

An age-appropriate boyfriend might have told me the same things, but I would not have believed him.

He showed me how tenses were to language what perspective was to painting. Tenses made a story three-dimensional. Had was further back in time than was, and is existed only on the surface. He introduced me to adjectives by calling them language’s colors. Adjectives gave a noun mood, as pigment gave a tone spirit.

Despite Arnold’s assurances, learning to write was not at all like learning to draw. To draw, I needed to open my eyes wide; to write, I needed to shut them tightly and turn the gaze on my naked self.

Does a story’s ending excuse its beginning? Does a kiss in one moment mean something else entirely five decades later?

But there was also kindness, like the evening a widow (her husband had been twenty-eight years older than she) took me aside at a dinner party to tell me not to waste my time rehearsing grief; I would never get it right.