Bøger af Jill Ciment

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.Ciment turned herself into a girl for whom a father is unnecessary-a tough girl who survived any way she could. She and her brother Jack helped support the family by working for a shady market researcher, quickly learning to supply their own answers to burning questions like, "Did we like Swanson TV dinners? If so, why? On a scale of one to ten, how would we rate the new Talking Barbie? Arrow wax? Dr. Ross's dog food?" She became a gang girl, a professional forger, and a Times Square porn model. Using a friend's SAT score she cheated her way into art school, and seduced and eventually married her art teacher, a married man thirty years her senior. 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 up, and finally overcoming the consequences of being the child of a father incapable of love and responsibility.

Jill Ciment's tough, tender first novel tells an unlikely, utterly beguiling love story. Both laugh-out-loud funny and heartachingly poignant, it is not only a delicate, loving portrayal of a daughter's fierce devotion to her wildly unconventional mother, but a surprisingly magical story of a true May/December relationship. Gloria is a modern-day "snake oil" saleswoman, a quixotic entrepreneur who sells everything from metal detectors to aphrodisiac perfumes but whose real stock-in-trade is hope. "I am not dealing with the banal arithmetic of earning a couple of bucks", she says, "I am dealing with the aerodynamics of human dreams". She and her teenage daughter, Kim, drive throughout the Southwest, pulling their trailer home from town to town, just one step ahead of the postmaster general ("I imagined him as a successful mailman with epaulets") and the FDA. It is the only world Kim has ever known - until Arthur literally comes crashing into their lives, demolishing the trailer and taking Kim's heart hostage. As the young girl and the gentle widower thirty years her senior begin to fall in love, a new home no less improbable than the first takes shape - an embodiment of the magic Gloria has tried all her life to peddle in a bottle. Meanwhile, Gloria has a vision in a car wash and launches into the scheme she hopes will bring her greatest triumph. . . By turns lyrical, droll, and hauntingly sad, this larger-than-life love story distills the ingredients of the only aphrodisiac that really works: one part mad dream, one part chance, and three parts genuine humanity.