NONFICTION - July 7, 1996

HALF A LIFE: A Memoir by Jill Ciment (Crown: $23, 224 pp.). It takes a certain audacity to write your memoirs while still relatively young, especially if you aren’t famous. Ciment has plenty of audacity, a quality that may have saved her life, and certainly enhances her book. At the center of an unusual childhood and adolescence is Ciment’s father, a pathetic, mentally ill man whose “rages and fears bubbled up from his being, hissing and exploding within him like seltzer shaken in an airtight bottle.” When Herbert Ciment is finally thrown out of the house by his wife, he lives for days in his Chevy at the bottom of their driveway, unable to comprehend why this has happened.

Reading “Half a Life” feels like sitting down to dinner with someone you really like. It gets late, you have to work in the morning, yet the intimacy is so intense, the story so compelling, that instead of going home you say, “And what happened then, Jill?” Given the difficult, dramatic events of her life, Ciment’s lack of self-pity and histrionics is nothing short of incredible. She writes with absolute compassion. “Half a Life” is full of humor, generosity and Ciment’s amazing tenacity, which at the time may have seemed useless but, in retrospect, was nothing short of heroic.