Consent
Jill Ciment was sixteen when she met the painter who would become her husband, a married man thirty years her senior. Their marriage lasted more than four decades, until his death. In this short, searching memoir she goes back over that love story, including an earlier book she wrote about it, and asks hard questions in the light of the #MeToo era. Can a relationship that began with such an imbalance of power and age be understood as love? How honest was the version she told before? Ciment refuses easy answers, holding her own life up to scrutiny without excusing or condemning it. The result is an unflinching look at consent, memory, and a marriage.
What you might want to know about Consent
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A writer reexamines her decades-long marriage to a much older man she met as a teenager, asking how to judge the past by the present's standards.
Yes. Ann Patchett recommended it on PBS NewsHour's summer reading segment in 2024.
Yes. It revisits and questions her 1996 memoir Half a Life, which told an earlier version of the same relationship.
Consent was written by Jill Ciment, published in 2024 by Pantheon.
Consent is 160 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Consent takes most readers 2 to 3 hours to finish.
Consent is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
