I don’t remember where I heard about this book, but I thought, “Oh, that sounds interesting.” So, I put myself on the waiting list for both the physical copy and the audiobook at the library. The audiobook came available first and I checked it out but I couldn’t make myself start it. It was something that I wanted to read and yet I was having trouble even beginning to read it. There was just something about the subject matter that made me think, “Oh, this is going to be a hard read. I don’t know if I feel like reading something hard right now…” And, I kept coming up with excuses until I had to return the audiobook unread.
Well, when the physical copy became available, I went and got it. The memoir is only 145 pages, so it is a little whisp of a book. That made it seem a little less daunting. (Although the audiobook is only four hours so, I don’t know what my deal was.) And it wasn’t hard to read. The prose was thoughtful and I was pulled into the story. Ciment’s memoir is about her relationship with artist Arnold Mesches and is part a revisiting of a previous memoir Half a Life and in part just a new memoir about a marriage seen from a new perspective. The story starts at the beginning of the relationship when she first started taking art classes from Arnold as a sixteen-year-old and follows through his divorce from his first wife, their marriage, and their life together up to his death at the age of ninety-three.
I think I was expecting something more negative and maybe not so much critical, there is nuance here. And a lot of questions are posed that the text really doesn’t answer. What we see is a relationship, the give and take and the joys and sorrows, just like you would have in any relationship. But there was also an investigation of power and understanding. Ciment tells us about being a teenager or someone in her early twenties and feeling powerful. She talks about when she felt jealous. She talks about when she felt supported or when she had to be supporting. As someone looking at a relationship that is now over, she has the 40,000-foot view, but also the memories of what it was like being inside it. She discusses how things that are obvious in hindsight, like how it feels cliche to think that she was, as a sixteen-year-old looking for a father figure, whom she found in someone her father’s age, but how clicheness of it part of the truth that we shouldn’t look away from just because it feels obvious. Ciment discusses what it is like being the younger woman, even as they age, and what that meant for her, watching her partner fall apart when she is still very much in her prime. I don’t know, I think I was expecting this to be more condemning of the relationship, but it wasn’t and I’m glad it wasn’t. Even though there was a power imbalance and even if, at seventeen, she hadn’t been considering what it would mean to be married to someone so much older than her, she still had agency and she exercised it. Following his divorce from his first wife, her husband had an artistic revival, something that may never have happened to him otherwise. And she went from painting to conceptual art to writing, a path she might not have otherwise taken without his support. This was thoughtful and interesting. And it left me with more questions than answers. I’m writing this review hours after I finished reading the book (so I could reference it before I have to return it to the library), but I have a feeling this is a memoir I am going to consider for quite a while.
2 Women, So Many Books 