Title: Half a life
First published: 1996
Description: Half a Life is a luminously written memoir that will stand beside such autobiographical classics as This Boy's Life, Stop Time, and The Liars' Club. A scrupulously honest and hauntingly sad look at what it's like to be poor and fatherless in America, it shows how a girl without means or promise and with only a loving mother, chutzpah, a bit of fraud, and a lot of luck turned herself into somebody.

Half a Life begins with the Ciments' immigration from Montreal's middle-class Jewish suburbs to the fringe desert communities of Los Angeles, a landscape and culture so alien that their father loses the last vestiges of his sanity. Terrified and broke, he brutalizes his wife and children. When the family finally throws him out, he lives for weeks in his car at the foot of their driveway.

Ms. Ciment turns herself into a girl for whom a father is unnecessary - a tough girl who will survive any way she can. She becomes a gang girl, a professional forger, a crooked pollster, and a porno model. By age eighteen, she seduces and marries a man thirty years her senior - to whom she is still married.

By turns comic, tragic, and heartrending, Half a Life is a bold, unsentimental portrait of the artist as a girl from nowhere, making herself up from scratch, acting out, and finally overcoming the consequences of being the child of a father incapable of love and responsibility.
Subjects: Social life and customs, Families, Family, American Authors, Authors, American, Children of the mentally ill, Childhood and youth, Biography, Fathers and daughters, Canadian Women authors, Women authors, California, social life and customs, Adult children of dysfunctional families
Places: California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles (Calif.)
People: Jill Ciment
Time periods: 20th century