Half a Life: A Memoir - Paperback

by Jill Ciment (Author)

Unflinchingly honest, moving, and funny, Half a Life 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 into somebody. In 1964 the Ciment family left middle-class Montreal for the fringe desert communities of Los Angeles, where their always unstable father lost the last vestiges of his sanity. Terrified and broke, in a world he could neither understand nor control, he came apart. When the family finally threw him out, he lived for weeks in his car at the foot of their driveway.

Author Biography

Jill Ciment is the author of Small Claims and The Law of Falling Bodies, which The New York Times called "a radiant first novel...keenly observed and beautifully written." She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Foundation for the Arts. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University and Rutgers University and lives in New York City.