Arnold read and discussed the first memoir with her — commenting, for example, that he would never have called a student “sweetheart.” But he was not alive to respond to Consent, and Ciment tries to imagine his reactions.
She questions her earlier assertion that she would never love anyone more than Arnold: “Could I have felt so sure of my love at 17 that I knew nothing would surpass it? Or was my 45-year-old self, in the middle of the marriage and the memoir, trying to burnish the story with love lest it read like a reenactment of Humbert Humbert and Lolita’s cross-country road trip?” Was she protecting Arnold, even though the statute of limitations had long passed?
In a particularly astute passage, Ciment highlights how language reflects changing social attitudes and colors our views — which makes it difficult to judge past behavior by today’s moral codes:
“If Arnold kissed me first, should I refer to him in the language of today — sexual offender, transgressor, abuser of power? Or do I refer to him in the language of the late ’90s, when my 45-year-old self wrote the scene? The president at that time was Clinton, and the blue dress was in the news. Men who preyed on younger women were called letches, cradle-robbers, dogs. Or do I refer to him in the language of 1970, at the apex of the sexual revolution, when the kiss took place — Casanova, silver fox?”
Time also alters the words that might be used to describe teenaged Ciment: a victim or survivor in today’s parlance, a bimbo or vixen in the ’90s, a cool chick in the ’70s.
It turns out there was plenty Ciment omitted in Half a Life, including uncomfortable details like the fact that Arnold had not just a wife but another longstanding mistress when they first got together. And that, ever the teacher, he instructed her on sexual techniques and helped her prepare a portfolio of explicit sexual drawings from the female point of view for her application to CalArts school.
These early elisions provide a pointed reminder that all writing is selective, and memoirs are certainly no exception.