Alison Stewart: When author Jill Ciment met her future husband, Arnold, she was 16, he was 47, married with two children. When she was 17, a student of his, they began an affair that turned into a 45-year-relationship. Now, in the wake of Arnold's death and in the light of the hash MeToo movement, Jill is re examining the early days of their relationship. She's also taking a new look at her 1996 memoir, Half A Life, which recounts a very different version of how their love affair began. In her new memoir, Consent, Jill tries to reconcile the true love she felt for her husband, a talented artist, with the way their relationship began. Jill writes, "Had Arnold experienced the sea-change of the hash MeToo era, would he have come to believe that he had crossed a line when he first kissed me? Does a story's ending excuse its beginning? Does a kiss in one moment mean something else entirely five decades later? Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself?" Consent: A Memoir is out now, and author Jill Ciment joins me now to discuss. Hi. Welcome.

Jill Ciment: Thank you so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: When was the last time you read your 1996 memoir, Half a Life before the process of re examining it.

Jill Ciment: I never reread my work, so I never even reread Half a Life to write Consent. I only read the parts about Arnold. Rereading your old work is like looking at your high school yearbook. It's just a horrific experience.

Alison Stewart: You know that memoirs almost tell the reader about the time in which they were written. When you think about the '90s, we've been re examining the '90s clearly, how is your memoir a product of the '90s?

Jill Ciment: The '90s are bookended by the Anita Hill hearings, and then it ends with the Clinton fiasco with Monica Lewinsky. I think that that decade was a decade in which people started to question these incredible imbalances of power, but it still wasn't a decade in which you could see these things as changing culture. It wasn't yet. Monica Lewinsky, for example, was still called a bimbo and a vixen, and she was still accused of seducing the older man. Whereas today, we would look at it completely differently.

Alison Stewart: How would we look at it now?

Jill Ciment: Today, we would see the imbalance of power made it impossible for, in Monica's case, to say no, but at the same time, when that news broke, most of the women I know said they would have probably done the same thing as Monica, to have a man of power and to have an affair with them. It was a time where it was still in gray area. It became black and white, really, after the MeToo movement.

Alison Stewart: When the MeToo movement began, we started examining these questions about power dynamics and imbalance of power. Did you think of your own marriage when you first start hearing about it and feeling it?

Jill Ciment: Immediately. I mean, again, my whole marriage, and if you look at my 1996 memoir, it treats our imbalance of power almost comedically. Whereas when I look back and I thought, would I have stopped if I knew a 16-year-old was being sought after by a 47 year old? Yes, I would intervene. I was a professor, and I did intervene. At the same time, I also know that I had agency at that age, and I truly believe that I saw something I wanted and I went after it.

It's very hard for me to think of myself as a victim or a survivor, because I did feel empowerment, and I don't know how to reconcile that with the larger questions that people say, that it's always an imbalance of power. Internally, I believe that when I was 17, it was something I really wanted. Now, had Arnold been a different kind of man and said no and walked away, that would have been a very different outcome, obviously.

It was something that I wanted, and one reason I think I wrote the 1996 memoir Half a Life differently than did Consent is because at that time, I really wanted to show that I had agency, that I was empowered to go after things that I wanted, even though I was the younger one.

Alison Stewart: You mentioned that you'd stepped in in certain circumstances. Did any woman step in when you first started having your relationship with Arnold?

Jill Ciment: I went to a party where there were friends of Arnold's, and they offered everyone a martini and me a glass of milk. I'm sure people were hinting at stepping in, but not really. It was sort of an accepted thing. I went to a college where I would say there was a lot of exchange between professors and students, so it was more of a milieu in which it was acceptable.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with Jill Ciment, author of the new book Consent: A Memoir about her relationship with her late husband, which began when she was 17 and he was 47. You spent a lot of time about who kissed whom first. In your memoir from the '90s you write, "I unbuttoned the top three buttons of my peasant vows, crossed the ink splattered floor, and kissed him. He kissed me back, then stopped himself." Today, you're sure that he kissed you? First of all, why do you think you remembered it in a different version than the '90s?

Jill Ciment: I don't know if I remembered it differently. I know that I wanted to portray it differently. I didn't want to portray myself as every book that came out in the '90s, the '80 and '70s, which were written by older men, whether it was film or movies, was always the story of the older man going after the younger girl. I mean that was a famous trope from our time. I guess when I wrote it in the 1990s, I didn't want that to be the definition of my marriage, because whoever kissed who first, it was a kiss I deeply wanted.

However, everything that generated from that kiss makes me wonder whether I would have. I know that I went to seduce him. It was about six months later, after the kiss. I don't know if I would have had the nerve to have done what I did, to go after him that much had he not kissed me first. It's a very gray area. I'm pretty sure he kissed me first, but it's memory, and memory is really elusive.

Alison Stewart: To your memory, though, when the first time you wrote about this, you sort of fudged around the edges?

Jill Ciment: I did. I probably did fudge around the edges, but it seemed more of the truth to me at that time than had I made him the aggressor.

Alison Stewart: What would have happened had he been the aggressor, had he made the initial overture?

Jill Ciment: Then it would have made me into a victim, and at that time, again, I was trying to give myself empowerment, and I didn't know how. There was no language for this imbalance of power. There was no language yet for women speaking up against it. I was in the middle of a wonderful marriage, so to go back and probably reconceive this thing, I think I told the truth in 1996, and I also think I told the truth in Consent, because both those things are true.

Alison Stewart: In your original memoir, you left out the detail that Arnold had been having a long term affair with another woman at the same time that you two got together. Just so we're clear, did you make that omission on purpose?

Jill Ciment: I didn't think of it as important at that time. I mean, Half a Life is really the story of a kid. It's mostly about my childhood. It's mostly about having no father or a very absent father, and so I wasn't writing only about Arnold and I, and it didn't seem to be part of that conversation. I left it out, but looking back at having left it out, I think that that was crazy to have left that, and it was such a fundamental part of how the circumstances of our getting together came about.

I think that people tell different stories. I think memoir is not necessarily about accuracy, it's about memory. I think that memory is always shifting, and I think that-- one of the things, when I finished Half a Life, I knew I always wanted to go back to this material. I didn't know how, and it didn't really present me how until the MeToo movement came out. I think that going back to the same event over different periods of your life, probably provides you very different stories of that same event, and that's what I was interested in doing.

Alison Stewart: I'm not sure you covered this in your book. I read it through, and I want to make sure. Were you sure that he was faithful to you in your marriage?

Jill Ciment: I'm really sure he was faithful to me, but I could be kidding myself, too. The reason I'm sure he was faithful to me is because we were really happy. I think it's very rare that people who are really happy and having a good sex life have affairs. I'm counting on that, but maybe he did have affairs.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with Jill Ciment, author of the new book Consent: A Memoir. It's about her relationship with her late husband, which began when she was 17 and he was 47. You write, "My mother and I shared a bed because I had sold mine in order to turn my bedroom into an art studio. My father, whose side of the bed I occupied, had moved out, been thrown out the year before. What writer wouldn't employ the irony of sleeping in your absent father's bed after trying to seduce your father's substitute?" Looking back on it now, how much do you think your relationship with Arthur was about your own fraught relationship with your father?

Jill Ciment: In the first memoir, it's completely absent, that extraordinary, obvious thing. I left it out because I felt it was so obvious, but in Consent, it's really about what it is to be fatherless. That's part of what the story is, and I sought out Arnold because I really needed to know what it was like to be loved by an older man. Also, in Consent, there's also a part of the book that's also about my brother, my youngest brother's molestation by a neighbor, which is an entirely different thing than what Arnold and I had.

I put it in one because it's so much a part of my story. Also, to say that fatherless kids are very susceptible, you have a desperate need to know what it's like to be loved and protected by an older man. I think that my whole family was in some ways, vulnerable to that. In many ways, I think that one of the reasons that I got involved with Arnold was to bring a stable man into the family, which seems ironic, but that is, I think, one of my motivating factors.

Alison Stewart: Your own mom came to look at him, sort of husband light, in a way. She would call him when things went wrong. Did it feel strange to share him with your mom?

Jill Ciment: No. I love my mother and I had a very close relationship, and she was burning through men at that time, too. Arnold was the most stable man we had yet encountered as a family. I think my brothers came to love him, both as a brother in-law, but also as a father figure. My mother and him became very, very close friends.

Alison Stewart: What stability did he provide for you?

Jill Ciment: In those days, first of all, in 1971, when my mother got a divorce, she had no credit cards. All the credit cards had been in my father's name. Women didn't have credit cards. She wanted to buy a little condo, and unless you got a man to sign for it, no bank would give a single mother a mortgage. Arnold, in a certain sense, provided all of those things. He signed for the mortgage, helped her get credit cards. He did what was necessary, because women could not really run their own lives in those days.

Alison Stewart: You've listed all the really important ways he helped you and helped your family. Did you and Arnold ever have a conversation about why he wanted to start a relationship with someone so very much younger?

Jill Ciment: I don't think we talked about it per se in that direct way. I think Arnold was somebody, I think he, at the time he met me, was in a very vulnerable place. I think his career had tanked for a while, and he grabbed onto, I guess, the ascent of someone young. His other mistress was age appropriate, so he wasn't somebody who went only after young people. I think that I had a kind of strength at that age. I may not even have that strength anymore, but a kind of assuredness and strength and drive that drew him in, too.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with Jill Ciment, author of the new book Consent: A Memoir about her relationship with her late husband. They were married 45 years. The relationship began when she was 17 and he was 47. I have to ask you, at your young age, did you fully understand what Arnold was leaving behind, his wife, his kids, to be with you?

Jill Ciment: No, I had no. First of all, I had come from such a broken family. I had no idea what I was doing by going after somebody who was married. It really was outside. Now, I deeply understand, and now I have to say, of all the things I regret, that's the one thing I regret, that I broke up a marriage. However, I don't actually think I broke up the marriage. The marriage was falling apart. He already had a mistress, but still, that's something that, again, at 17, you have no idea what somebody who's-- his marriage was 26 years old. That was something outside of my even comprehension of what I was doing.

Alison Stewart: His previous marriage was around longer than you were around?

Jill Ciment: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Do you have any idea what happened to his ex wife?

Jill Ciment: Oh, yeah. Unfortunately, she died about 20 years ago. She went on and had her own life. One of the ironies of all times is she ended up dating a man that had also dated my mother. So there you go.

Alison Stewart: Arnold had a daughter about the same age as you, and she was troubled, which you detail in the book, the kind of trouble where Arnold had to help her out throughout her life. What was your relationship with her?

Jill Ciment: My relationship with her, at first, we were 18 when we met each other, and I didn't know if I was supposed to be her stepmother, her friend, her father's lover. It was such a confusing thing, and it was one of the most difficult things, but in the end, my role became that of a stepmother. I was there with Arnold to make decisions that I hope benefited her, but I also think that it would be also untrue to say that Arnold wasn't also looking for a daughter as much as I was looking for a father.

Alison Stewart: Did he ever treat you like a daughter?

Jill Ciment: No, because we had a sexual relationship, and no father treats their daughter that way. He didn't treat me like a daughter. However, I had the protection of an older man, and that sense of feeling safe that I had never had before. I don't know how to reconcile that.

Alison Stewart: At one point in the memoir, you are mistaken for his caregiver. What did you learn about aging by watching your husband go through it?

Jill Ciment: I learned so much about aging, but now that I'm aging, I realize how little I learned. I'm 71, and now that I'm the age that I remember dragging Arnold around the world and the kind of energy and what I wanted as a 41-year-old, I marvel that he was able to keep up with me. I think I'm going to learn about aging now that he's dead, because now I'm entering the aging process that he went through. I don't think I really understood it as a young person.

It's interesting now for me to try and go back over my marriage and to see how a man of 80 could keep up with a person of 50. It's astonishing to go back and look at the kind of energy he exuded, which he probably got mostly because he was in a relationship with someone so much younger. What I learned about aging is that it is as astonishing a change that one goes through the last 20 years of your life, as the first 20 years of your life.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the new book Consent: A Memoir. I'm speaking with its author, Jill Ciment. It's about her relationship with her husband. She was married for 45 years. It began when she was 17 and he was 47. What did Arnold bring to your life that maybe a younger partner would not have been able to?

Jill Ciment: I think he brought a lot of things to my life. One, I think that his belief in me as an artist and then as a writer, I think was more powerful for me because I gave so much power to older men, maybe because I didn't have a father, but also because the whole world gave power to older men. I think that he was able to provide for me a kind of confidence that a younger man may not have given me.

When he would say, "This works," I would have a belief that it works, because at that time, in those days, having someone of power anoint you an artist was your best chance of becoming one, and I really wanted to live the life of an artist.

Alison Stewart: You had, by your own account, a very successful marriage. Do you think your feelings about the power and balance in the relationship would be different if it had ended differently?

Jill Ciment: Oh, my God. If he hadn't left his wife and I had just been madly in love with him at 17, I would probably have written a very different memoir. I think that the happy marriage that followed the very shaky beginning or the very scandalous beginning, it would have remained.

There's a number of memoirs that are out right now about women who had affairs with older men, and there are memoirs about anger and abuse, and it wasn't my story. When I told my story, it's different. It's not about anger and abuse, but that's only because we went on to have a happy marriage, believe me. I don't believe it would have been so, had we had a disastrous one.

Alison Stewart: You write, "Does a story's ending excuse its beginning?" As you're having all of these conversations and interviews with interviewers like me, does your answer change that question?

Jill Ciment: I think a story's ending does change its beginning because you don't really-- I mean, my story with Arnold doesn't end until he dies. Had that death been embittered or angry, I don't know if I would have looked back. But that death was also an extraordinary experience, hopefully for Arnold, but certainly for me, to take someone all the way to death is probably the most extraordinary thing you can do. I can't now turn back and see it as anything other than the most amazing experience of my life.

Alison Stewart: The name of the memoir is Consent: A Memoir. I've been speaking with its author, Jill Ciment. Thank you so much for joining us.

Jill Ciment: Thank you so much for having me.

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