This is a memoir that has many questions to ask, and is uninterested in giving them clear-cut answers. Ciment, older and perhaps wiser, reflects back both on her relationship with someone 30 years her senior, and her memoir about that relationship written 30 years ago when she was in her 40s, he in his 70s. Ciment both has much to say and less to say than you would expect. She appears uninterested in a narrative that portrays her as only a victim, as only the 17-year-old groomed (?), seduced (?) by a man in his middle age, a man who was first her art teacher, then eventually her husband. I respect her entirely for that. Because how do you grapple with the questions that such a relationship brings up? That, really, is the core of this memoir. What was that marriage? What was that relationship? What did it mean? 

Ciment does not want readers to be comfortable, she wants us to come along with her on this exploratory dig through her memories and previous memoir. She pulls block quotes from them, examines them, tells us when she was lying. At one point she says "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 was written than the period that is being written about." That is crystal clear in these pages and in the excerpts from Half a Life, the previous memoir. She is obviously not entirely comfortable with the way her relationship started, yet she is also not willing to say that there was nothing good about it. 

I have nothing but respect for her and her incredible vulnerability and willingness to explore such a huge question, such a fraught topic in public.