Consent: A Memoir

by Jill Ciment

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.

memoir is closer to historical fiction than it is to biography.

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. The fact that he was old enough to be my father was what elevated me above the line of wallflowers, girls who had to wait for boys their own age to ask them to dance.

Was our transaction that afternoon—a full scholarship in exchange for sexual arousal—even steven, or did these men take advantage of me? Or did I take advantage of them?

I didn’t believe a group of women had the authority to pronounce me an artist.

“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.”

He was looking at a sketch of a woman who resembled the Mona Lisa. The placard beside the drawing explained that the artist had described Mona Lisa’s features to a police sketch artist and this drawing was the result. Arnold found conceptual art clever but cold.

Had Arnold experienced the sea change of the MeToo era, would he have come to believe that he crossed a line when he first kissed me? Does a story’s ending excuse its beginning? Does a kiss in one moment mean something else entirely five decades later? Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself? —

I waited for him to say something about what had happened earlier that day when the sixty-foot semitrailer truck containing his life’s work had first pulled into the dirt driveway. He had cried (I had only seen him cry once before, and that was for his daughter), and when I asked him why, he apologized for burdening me with his life’s work.