THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 18, 1996 TAG: 9608190215
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JULIE PARKER
LENGTH: 75 lines
HALF A LIFE
JILL CIMENT
Crown Publishers. 210 pp. $23.
The memoir has resurfaced as this decade's most popular form of soul-baring. Autobiographies tend to have a chronological time line, but the author of a memoir takes discretionary chunks and slices from life and uses them as sound-bites, chosen for their cathartic value as much as for entertainment. Half a Life, Jill Ciment's new memoir, is one such work.
Like good paintings, whose success is often dependent on the degree of angst of the painter, a good memoir, doused with melancholy, had better have something interesting to tell us.
Half A Life delivers.
If you felt misunderstood, mistreated and alone as a teenager, Ciment can see you and raise you. But here's the good news: Far from being one long whine, Half A Life is a fascinating journey through total dysfunction into triumph.
Ciment begins her story at the moment that her middle class Jewish life begins to go awry. It is 1964 when the family moves from the tree-lined suburbs of Toronto to an arid, treeless development bordering the California desert.
It is there her father begins to become undone. In fact, as his wife and children struggle to make ends meet, he becomes increasingly alienated from them and then from life itself.
When they finally agree to throw him out, in a torturous scene, he lives in his car for weeks at the end of the driveway, unable to comprehend any wrong-doing on his part. The family's life becomes a seamy, hardscrabble struggle.
Jill begins junior high school in her new surroundings burdened with the added responsibility of being an under-age breadwinner. Pretty routine stuff, so far. But it's the choices Jill makes that set this book apart and ultimately make her someone special.
Instead of selling food at the local burger joint, or lipstick at the five-and-ten, Jill, along with her mother and older brother Jack, hooks up with a sleazy con-man named Lenny. They spend their afternoons in vast malls as pollsters. Jill, as ``con-girl-in-training,'' learns to forge survey responses under Lenny's direction.
Jill, whose love of drawing and painting keeps her sane and focused, gathers up her nerve to attend an art class, unsure of her own abilities but driven somehow to know more, to succeed. She falls instantly in love with the instructor, who is a generation older.
Eventually she seduces him, luring him away from his wife and grown children and finally into marriage. They are still together.
But first, Jill tears herself away from the instructor, lured by the excitement of the New York art scene in the 60s. But once there she takes a downward spiral, working as a stripper and overwhelmed by an impersonal city where she can't seem to take hold.
There is never a time when Ciment completely loses sight of her goals for success, though. Once back in Los Angeles and the arms of her instructor she works furiously, preparing a portfolio for entry into college.
Never having graduated from high school, she convinces a friend to take the SATs for her. The resulting scores and her portfolio are good enough to overcome her lack of a diploma and win her a partial scholarship to Cal State.
Half a Life is a small book - half a life, after all - that reads like a phone call from a long lost friend. It is written without self pity, a straight-forward and totally honest account. Ciment creates a sensitive portrait of her mother, but it's the men in her life who are such great supporting characters, artfully rendered.
The need to write seems to have overtaken Ciment's art career. She has authored two previous books, received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and others, and is now teaching creative writing at two universities in New York City, a sweet victory indeed. MEMO: Julie Parker is a writer and artist who lives on the Eastern
Shore. by CNB