What Does It Mean to Reconsider a Memoir?

Truth and Memoir in the News, Again

This week, the New York Times did a story about Consent, a new memoir by Jill Ciment. The short version of the Times coverage is this: Consent is a reconsideration of Ciment’s 1996 memoir, Half a Life, in which she claimed it was she, not her future husband, who initiated their sexual relationship when she was seventeen and he was forty-seven. A real-life Lolita beginning to what turned out to be a 45-year marriage. The new book, at least in part, aims to set the record straight, and to grapple with the first book’s distortions, flaws, and factual errors.

A few of my authors sent me this article, I’m sure for the provocative part where Ciment takes memoir to task. About the genre, she said:  

“The whole idea of writing truth in a memoir is so preposterous. You have these scattered memories, and you’re trying to carve a story out of them.”

The issue, of course, is that Truth is subjective. Much ink has been spilled on the topic of truth and memoir. Mary Karr tackles it head on in The Art of Memoir. To say it’s preposterous to write the truth in memoir, well . . . it’s an oversimplified take at best. I’d go on, but now having read Consent, I feel more generous toward Ciment.  

She’s a good writer, and what she says about truth in her book is more nuanced than what she said to the Times reporter. She speculates at one point about what she would have said to Arnold about this new memoir if he were still alive. “This is a reconsideration,” she suggests she might have said.

No thoughtful person has the same fixed ideas over time, so reconsideration would seem to be fertile ground for memoirists. In Ciment’s case, however, it’s more than reconsideration. She’s acknowledging that she bent the truth, or told it in a way that shined a more positive light on Arnold. Ciment writes, “I had intended to write the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but I could not find it, or perhaps I found it everywhere.”

My observations of Ciment through the article and in the book have me feeling like an armchair therapist, but Consent is a book that’s practically begging its reader to analyze alongside the author. Arnold was her first reader. When she wrote Half a Life, she and Arnold had been together for half her life. Ciment said in the Times piece that couples have shared mythologies, and Consent unpacks uncomfortable *truths* about the power imbalance of their relationship when they met. He was her teacher. She was seventeen. There was nothing appropriate about their origin story. But then, thirty years later, she wrote a memoir, and her most important reader was her husband of many years. Invariably, she would have wanted to make their relationship look okay, good, normal. Invariably it was all those things by the time they’d been together for three decades. If she was the instigator, Arnold doesn’t look so bad, but she acknowledges in her reconsideration that in a post-#MeToo world, Arnold wouldn’t have been spared.

I have witnessed memoirists I’ve worked with over the years writing for their partners, for their parents, for their children, for their mythology. Sometimes I can feel this in a memoirist’s writing and I call it out, but I’m sure this surfaces plenty often when I can’t feel it, too. Also, Half a Life was written in 1996. The genre was not what it is today. It predates the memoir scandals that were A Million Little Pieces and Three Cups of Tea, whose fallouts impacted the genre in profound ways, unleashing the fear of God into many writers of memoir who believed they’d be lit on fire if they didn’t tell The Truth. I’ve seen that notion of The Truth relax in recent years, though, and in my six-month memoir course I coteach with Linda Joy Myers (NAMW), we encourage writers to focus on emotional truth over factual accuracy.  

On the one hand, I appreciate Ciment’s efforts. Consent is a worthwhile book. That she criticizes memoir, the very genre she’s choosing to explore again, left me a little cold at times. For instance, she writes:

“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. A memoir is closer to historical fiction than it is to biography, and as with historical fiction, the reader often learns more about the period in which the book is written than the period that is being written about.”

I disagree. Writers of historical fiction make up what they imagine the characters they’re writing might have thought and felt, through the context of research, but not lived experience. Writers of memoir, on the other hand, work to recall what they themselves thought/felt, or might have or would have thought/felt based on their own lived experience and memory of the actual events. A key story Ciment interrogates in Consent centers on who made the first move—her (in Half a Life) or Arnold (in Consent). Was the memory in fact so fuzzy when she wrote Half a Life, or had she simply chosen the version of events that supported their relationship? Once Arnold died, did her memory of what really happened come flooding back, or was it just that now she was free to tell the truth? There’s a reason many memoirists wait, or feel that they have to wait, until a certain person in their lives dies to finally write or publish their memoirs, and that reason is a desire to tell the Truth.

Timing also matters because memoir demands deep self-awareness. At forty-seven, Ciment should have been more self-aware than to fill her memoir with distortions. But, the book was a product of her relationship to and with Arnold and of the time in which it was written (1996, pre-#MeToo), and influenced by personal factors that she unpacks in Consent: the absence of her father; the seductive power of being the much-younger woman; and her love for the husband she was sharing a life with when Half a Life was published.

Reconsideration is an interesting thing to mull over, though, and I read Consent with openness and curiosity. Ciment clearly loved Arnold and Arnold loved her. Their origin story is complex, and hers to grapple with this many years later. But I wonder, will this book will spur others to pen their own reconsiderations? Frankly, I’m not sure I want to read too many more reconsidered memoirs. I’m not sure I have the stamina to wade into many more books that engage in the kind of intense speculation Ciment does about why she did this or why she did that. We are all different people today than we were thirty years ago. Ciment grapples with this, writing in the book, “Does a kiss in one moment mean something entirely different five decades later?”

Simple answer: Yes.

Perhaps memoir is a flawed container, but it is a container of Truth, and it’s incumbent on writers of memoir to write the truth as they know it, as they understand it. If their truth is flawed or distorted or full of factual errors, a reckoning is undoubtedly warranted. But please, let’s not blame the genre for a writer’s skewering of Truth. It’s not memoir’s fault if writers believe their own falsehoods, or misrepresent their stories. As a memoir teacher, I read Consent as almost a cautionary tale. Writers of memoir, be rigorous, be self-honest, be self-interrogating. I believe most memoirists are, and that the genre is flourishing for these efforts.