January 2, 2025 • 44 mins
At the age of sixteen, Jill began a relationship that lasted most of her life with her much-older professor. Twenty-five years ago, she wrote a memoir. But with time comes new memories, new clarity. She’s realized something: it's time to tell the story again, and differently.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
I'm fairly certain that it was I who seduced him
that afternoon, But would I have if he had not
kissed me first? Am I as delusional as Humbered? Humbered?
When he narrates Lolita was twelve at the time, it
was she who seduced me. In both scenes from the memoir,
(00:28):
Arnold is passive, either lost in thought or asleep when
I appear like a nymph in the forest. There is
empowerment in remembering oneself as his sexual aggressor, especially after
modeling at Escapades. But I don't believe that was my
motivation when I wrote this? Was I protecting Arnold? The
(00:49):
statute of limitations had long ago past. Was I protecting
my marriage? We had just celebrated our twenty seventh anniversary.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
That's Jill Cement, novelist, memoirist, professor of English at the
University of Florida in Gainesville, an author of two memoirs,
Half a Life and Consent, written more than twenty five
years apart. These books are an extraordinary testament to the
secrets we keep from ourselves and the way the passage
(01:23):
of time informs our memories and our understanding of the past.
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets
(01:44):
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and yes, the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
I was born in Canada to a kind of middle
clas last Jewish family. My father's parents were more educated
than my mother's and were from a much higher class,
and they got married under the circumstances that people get
married under in those days. She wanted to get out
(02:17):
of the house and not work for her father, and
he was strange, and they got married. And so I
grew up in this kind of milieu of you know,
old Montreal, very very close knit Jewish community, almost deadly
in its insularity. Then when I was about ten, we
(02:38):
immigrated to the United States, to Los Angeles. We were
able to immigrate because my grandfather had applied for the lottery.
My father was ill prepared for it, he was autistic,
and my mother was just dying to escape Montreal. So
we came up there, and then, you know, my father
(03:00):
couldn't adjust to immigration, my mother was thrilled to be
in California. They eventually get divorced and we fall about
three or four classes down to the lower class because
I'm now the child of a single parent, and so
I grew up, you know, from the age of fourteen on.
I had a full time job and I helped support
(03:23):
the family. And that's kind of my background. I mean,
it was an unusual teenage shood because I had a
full time job. I was rushed into adulthood very early.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
And this would have been when you moved with your
family to LA This would have been in the late
nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
You know. I mean my parents got divorced when I
was about fourteen, and so it'd have been like sixty seven,
and so it sort of, you know, kind of went
along with the late sixties and seventies, which was a
sort of wild time, especially in Los Angeles.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
And do you have several brothers.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
I have three brothers. One is older than me and
we're almost like twins. His name is Gary. And then
I have a brother named James, who is five years
younger than me. And then there was the family mistake. Scott.
He was born just as my mother had saved up
enough money to divorce my father, and we had been
holding our breath for this moment of escape. And she
(04:25):
finds out she's pregnant and that you gave us another
two years. Under his strange authoritarianism, my father was sort
of like if you've ever seen rain Man, the Dustin
Hoffman character. He was able to kind of hold everything
together when we were in Montreal because he had an
extended family and everything was a routine. But once he
(04:48):
got to California, the pressure of not having his routine
just put him over the edge. And it was like
living with somebody who was in world in a constant terror.
If something was out of place and if money was spent,
it was like a black cloud of worries and craziness.
(05:09):
And so yeah, we all were very aware of it,
and we all wanted to escape it. And my mom
she was one of these women who you know, had
never even paid a bill. She didn't learn any of
those skills of how to survive. So when she wanted
to leave my father, we really had to think about
how we would survive. And my older brother and I
(05:29):
need a commitment that we would help her because there
was no other way. She wasn't prepared, as we weren't either,
and we all sort of figured it out together.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
When it's time for high school, Jill goes about three
days a week. Then on Friday mornings, she bore a
flight to different spots around the country because she has
a job, not a typical teenage job like bagging groceries
or scooping ice cream. No, this is a marketing research job.
Become was an emancipated miner, so she can sign contracts.
(06:03):
She's helping to support her family. At the same time,
she takes art classes on Monday nights because she's known
since the age of three that this is what she
wants to be. An artist.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
That's what I wanted to be. That's why I wasn't
too concerned about finishing high school. You know, I didn't
see how that was going to really help me become
an artist, which is insane because you know, the perspective
of a fifteen year old is hardly to be agreed with.
And that was a terrible student, and so it wasn't
like such a loss. My brother, who also worked full
time and did everything, managed to finish with straight a's
(06:38):
and go on to college. So it had as much
to do with my personality as it did with the circumstances.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
So tell me about at sixteen, you go to an
art show, a gallery show, and are drawn to the
work a particular work by an artist. Tell me about
that moment.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Well, actually he had the work in his wife's gallery
right the Pajer. Arnold Meshi's had some artwork in a
gallery and I had seen it in the window when
I was driving by, was on Ventura Boulevard, and you know,
I just had not seen that level of draftsmanship outside
of museums. And I was just dumbstruck because I'd only
(07:19):
seen that kind of like crappy art of seascapes, and
you know, I just hadn't you know. I thought that
was like living art, and then dead art was the
art you saw in the museum. And suddenly I realized, no,
there's an entire world of that outside, and I became
riveted by it. And so I had my mom call
the gallery and speak to Arnold's wife and see if
(07:42):
he would teach a fourteen you know, at the time,
I probably was sixteen, if I could go into a
life drawing class. So I changed from a lesser teacher
to him, and I started studying under Arnold.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
And these were existing classes, a group classes.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Yeah, they were private classes. Mostly there were as older
people in it. They were retirees, a few younger people,
but he had a studio, a kind of classroom in
Beverly Hills where he taught these classes near his studio.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
What comes to mind, like what language comes to mind
when it comes to first being sort of under Arnold's
tutelage and being part of these classes. What was he
to you initially?
Speaker 2 (08:24):
I mean, you know, first, he was the first real
artist that I had encountered, and it was what I
wanted to do. It's so confusing at that age. I mean,
you know, I wanted to win his approval. I was
enamored with him as a girl would have a crush
on someone. I really felt incredibly grown up to be
(08:48):
a part of a life drawing class where there was
nudity and people talked openly about genitalia in the context
of draftsmanship. It's pretty different than high school. And I
mean I wanted to be an artist since I was
like three years old. So it was this thing that
I wanted and I suddenly had access to it, and
(09:13):
it was thrilling. I was flirting with him and was trying,
in my own clumsy, sixteen year old way to be seducted.
I could see I was arresting his attention, and I
approach him and I kiss him.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
It's nineteen seventy. Jill is sixteen and Arnold is forty seven.
This is the year she kisses him, at least that's
how she chronicles it when she writes her first memoir,
Half of Life, published in nineteen ninety six. That book
exists as a sort of forensic evidence of what Jill
(09:52):
believed and remembered at a certain time. But time moves forward,
and with it, our perspectives, our memory are truths. Jill's
new memoir, Consent, begins and ends with this very kiss.
In Half a Life, the kiss is portrayed one way,
and in Consent it's portrayed another way. Who really kissed
(10:17):
who first? But long before she reflects on this, she
lives this. Jill and Arnold have this meaningful kiss in
nineteen seventy, but a relationship doesn't begin just yet. First,
she goes to New York.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
I arrived there with one hundred and fifty dollars that
I had saved up and the name of somebody where
he had a crash pad where I and my brother
could go and spend a couple of nights where we
tried to figure out how to survive in New York.
My brother was only going for a week to make
sure I wasn't going to be killed. Well, you know,
I started out there, and you know, it was an
(10:57):
impossible thing to do. I mean, I ended up drifting
off with a bunch of other runaways. And although I
was not a runaway, it was the early seventies in
New York City and it was you know, you can't
become an artist that way, and that was the lesson
I had to learn.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
And during those months, this memory of Arnold and Arnold's
kind of presence for you lingered. We wrote back and forth.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
He wrote me letters not I mean they were letters
that if somebody found them, it wouldn't look like we
had kissed. They were the letters of a student to
a professor and vice versa, and giving me advice on
how to survive there. But he kept promising he was
going to come to New York. I think that's why
I hung on for four months, because he always went
(11:47):
to New York as an artist. And then, you know,
I went back to Los Angeles. I took a greyhound bus.
My mother didn't even have enough money to send the airfare,
so I went back on a greyhound bus, and you know,
I was so depressed, and the only thing I would
do is I would drive past this house. You know.
(12:08):
I was love worn and I you know, and finally
one day I just built up the nerve to just
show up at his studio. And I had lost my virginity.
That was a big thing. And I went to a
studio and I tried to seduce him, which wasn't that hard.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
And that's how we began off Here, as Jill drives
in circles past Arnold's house, imagining him with his wife
of twenty five years and his two kids inside, there
may also have been the specter of her own father,
who was profoundly absent because of his autism, and then
(12:44):
literally absent, just gone. So her feelings about Arnold would
have been complicated. They're romantic and sexual, to be sure,
but that longing she feels has many layers. It's shortly
after her return to Los Angelus that their affair begins
in earnest.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
I mean, it was so many things on the way
in which one conceives of one's life. I think the
yearning was simply I think I was just so curious
to know what it would be like to be loved
by an older man. I think that was my big curiosity,
and I think that's what I sought out. And you know,
(13:25):
not only was art Old an older man, but he
was an artist. And you know, in those days, the
only person who could anoint you an artist was a
male artist. And you weren't going to be anointed by
a woman. At that point. There were no women artists
that you even saw. And so, you know, part of
that whole patriarchal thing was so bred into us that
(13:48):
the yearning to become successful only could be gotten through
the approval of a man, and there was no other
way in those days. Well, I came back from New York.
I just turned seventeen. I came back, and so I
started seeing him again a little bit before my eighteenth birthday,
(14:09):
and we started seeing each other in an illicit affair,
or as I put it in the book, I was
going steady and he was having an affair. And you know,
I was very open with My mother knew about it.
And again it was the seventies. She was also dating
a man named Arnold who was like ten years younger
than her, and even though she was very upset about it.
(14:30):
You know, there was a kind of laughter to it
as well, because that was kind of funny. And then
it was New Year's Eve and I just fell apart
in New Year's Eve because you know, I was eighteen
years old and I wanted to be on a date
for New Year's Eve and he was married, and you know,
at an adult party, and I just broke down and he,
(14:53):
I don't know, he left his wife. I mean, it's
such an unusual thing that happens. He left his wife.
He left with just toothbrush, she left the house, all
the money in the bank. We just started off together,
and I guess I had just turned eighteen, and I remember,
you know, at this point, I you know again, I
(15:13):
had just gotten into cal Arts as a student and
I got a scholarship and so I started my art
school education and he kind of returned to painting, and
so we started living together from that point forward. So
he went he was with me all throughout college, and
(15:34):
you know, it gave me obviously a very different version
of college. But you know, he kind of went to
college with me, and I think it revitalized him as
well in one sense. When I was enamored of him
as a seventeen year old girl and starting my affair,
I thought of him as a famous, successful artist, looking
(15:57):
back at it as a seventy one year old and
seeing that this was a man in his late forties
who hadn't succeeded as an artist in the way he
wanted to, and that, you know, he was not what
I thought he was. But because he wasn't what I
thought he was, this all powerful man, I went from
(16:22):
being enamored with him to seeing him as a vulnerable
human being. And I think that's what was able to
allow me to actually love him as opposed to always
be under his thumb of power. It was that he
wasn't the person I imagined him to be that allowed me
(16:42):
to fall in love with him. And I think that's
something that you know, when a young girl looks at
a powerful matter, what they assume is a powerful man,
and they don't see that, you know, all human beings
are fallible and filled with doubt and remorse in all
other emotions. And it was only as I started to
learn who Ornold actually was just a human being, that
(17:06):
I think the relationship went from what would be now
kind of risky and grooming into something much more like
any other marriage.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
And also likely the reason why the marriage lasted when
it was a relationship early on, where his colleagues were
literally placing bets on how long this was going to last.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
At what point did you make the switch from being
an artist to becoming a writer and why?
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Why? Is the question that has plagued me my whole life.
I have no idea, but I thought a great deal
about it. I made the switch. I was in graduate
school at Cal Arts. I had ten weeks left. I
had finished my DCS, which was a film. I was
going to become a kind of gudared like, you know, filmmaker,
and that film really made me realize that I can't
(18:06):
work with human beings, so that wasn't be a good
profession for me, and so I decided, I don't know,
I loved literature, and I just decided I would instead
of making a film and having to spend all that
money and work with people, I would just write my
films down. And at the time, I honestly had probably
(18:26):
never even written somebody a letter. I mean, I just
was so dyslexic, and it was such a weird choice
for me. Because I had. It wasn't like I had
any talent at this, and you know, I just made
this crazy decision. I dropped out of school. I sat down,
(18:47):
and I spent the next literally four years, I mean,
when I wasn't working, you know, practicing how to make
a sentence, studying literature. Arnold as this great gift bought
me the entire election of Norton Critical Edition, and I
was able to read my you know, I read from
gilganish for it and gave myself this huge education and
(19:10):
you know, practice becoming a writer. And that's how I
did it. And you know what, I had been able
to do it without the supporter of somebody like Arnold?
Probably not, but I you know, he was there and
he encouraged me to take this crazy journey.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Is there any part of you that feels like you
made the switch because you didn't want to directly compete
with him.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Oh, I'm sure. I mean I had already left painting
and drawing early, probably because I didn't want to compete
with him, and I had gone into conceptual art, so
I wasn't It wasn't like we were really overlapping in
esthetics and craft. But I'm sure I went over to
conceptual art, probably mostly because I was just enamored by
(19:55):
the idea of the auvant garde. I mean, it was
just like so big and I I think what happened
is it became nauseous with the app on guard and
it just seemed like such a it was so removed
from everyday people. I just didn't want to make art
for only wealthy people. So I didn't want to do
that anymore. I probably would have returned to painting, because
(20:15):
that is a history of something beyond that. But Arnold
was there, and he was already painting, and I think
that blocked that possible door. But I don't know if
I would have taken it anyhow. We were an incredibly
collaborative couple. He read every word that I wrote, and
(20:36):
I remember when I wrote my first book, he told
me to throw up the first fifty pages. I remember
having like a complete like conniption fit and crying and
tearing up paper and just you know, like as a
lunatic would do in their twenties, filled with hormones and ambition,
and you know, I would do the same thing to
(20:56):
his work. So it's you know, I would go in
and tell him this was horrible. That was we just
did it. We just were like completely, we collaborate. I
think one of the reasons that I never felt such
a great desire to return into painting was that I
kind of got to paint through him. And you know,
he had written some novels himself, and I think he
(21:18):
got to become a writer through me. And you know,
it was one of these marriages that were very much
involved in each other's work in a good way.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
I think we'll be back in a moment with more
family secrets. When Jill is twenty nine and Arnold is sixty,
(21:53):
he's made a painting that a gallery owner in New
York expresses interest in. But the gallery owner is on
the fence because she hasn't actually seen it, only slides.
So Jill encourages Arnold to roll up the painting and
they traveled to New York.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Unfortunately, the gallery didn't realize how old Arnold was. They
thought he was a kid, and so when they saw
his age, you know, they lost interest in wanting to
invest in somebody who's sixty, who really doesn't have the
long term investment range that you are looking for. And
(22:29):
so I convinced him to go over to the East Village,
which I had heard was kind of like a new
art scene, and you know, he stumbled into this gallery
with these young, amazing curators and he began a career
as an East Village artist. And you know, at the
same time, I was just beginning, you know, to become
a writer. So it was really I'd gotten an agent
(22:53):
and I was starting. So it was a moment when
we both moved to New York. Was the mid eighties,
It was you know, New York was really on fire
in terms of both literature and or something you don't
feel today when you're in New York.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
Jill and Arnold spend the next twenty years living in
New York. They continue to write and make art, and
their relationship remains deeply collaborative, but Jill is becoming increasingly
aware of their age gap, which during this time almost
seems to widen. A once vital, vibrant middle aged man,
(23:30):
Arnold is slowing down and becoming more physically vulnerable as
he ages.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
New York is a difficult place for old people. One
we lived in a five flight walk home, which became
the subject of one of my books because it was
insurmountable you know, it's an old person. If you end
up in a walk up, you are as trapped there
as you would be on the Kansas farm in the
middle of nowhere, you know, unable to drive. I mean,
(23:57):
so I knew as he was hitting eighty, I had
to come up with another plan. And so you know,
I ended up applying for teaching jobs and came down
here to Florida. But again, you know now that I'm
entering the age that Arnold had entered when I started
to notice an age, And now I'm in that place.
(24:21):
There are moments when I think about what I asked
him to do when he was in his seventies, like
travel with backpacks around Malaysia. We went around the world
to these remote islands. He just you know, tried to
keep up with me. And at seventy I realized, oh
my god. Like I remember when we would get to
(24:43):
New York. We had a place in New York, and
we would arrive and we'd have all these we had
the dog and all the suitcases, and I would throw
them down and I'd say, come on, let's take a
long walk. And he would say, oh, honey, I want
to lie down. I'm really tired. And I'd say, come on,
you only live one and I'd like force this old
man to walk around. So it's kind of an interesting
(25:05):
It's now I think about our relationship and I really
think about what it would have been like to be
here with such energy, you know, asking you to live
a life of somebody who's twenty five years younger, thirty
years younger.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Does that fall for you in some way into the
category of a secret that you were keeping from yourself
during that time, which was that he really was, that
you were asking of him something that was almost impossible
for him to do, or that you know that he
was getting old. I mean, he had this.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Vibrancy he did. He had a vibrancy in the end.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
And he was he never stopped working, and you know
this was not you know, sometimes people will say to
artists and writers, people who have regular jobs will talk
about retirement and kind of ask you when you're going
to retire, And you know, I think for artists and
writers we look at that question like never, never, with
some notable exceptions. But you know, he wasn't going to retire,
(26:06):
and he wasn't going to stop his work, and he
wasn't going to go gently, But was there a sense
on your part. Was there an awareness at that time
or is the awareness more what you have in retrospect.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
Only in retrospect you can see it when you went
on with people. There's no way to understand what it's
like to be in a body that suddenly feels finite
after having spent your life in the body that seemed infinite.
I think it's a secret everybody holds from themselves, like
(26:38):
he that's you know. I think the secret we all
hold from ourselves is that we're not going to die,
or you know, that's our secret is that we think
we're immortal. And until you understand that, and you only
understand it as you start to see your generation end
that you know, I think that, I mean, I think
(27:00):
it's the biggest secret we all keep from ourselves.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
Now, Jill's fifty and Arnold is eighty, and an extraordinary
thing happens. Arnold has a moment, a big moment as
an artist, and it begins with Jill sending away for
his FBI files. He makes art out of those files,
an illuminated manuscript, and has a one man show. This
(27:28):
late success makes it more palatable when Jill wants them
to move to Florida, where she gets a teaching job,
Florida being an easier place to be old.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
At that time, almost all the old lefties were sending
away for their files. It was I remember Grace Paley
came as a visiting writer, and I was trying to
show her alligators, because you can see alligators from my backyard,
and she wasn't interested. She was much more interested in
Arnold's FBI files because she had just sent away for hers,
and so it was kind of like this kind of
(28:01):
crazy time. So he may have sent away for it,
but he got discouraged about what he could do with them,
and I encouraged him to keep going. So I feel
responsible for those. It's an amazing series and he I mean,
I think one reason he was able to leave New
York without feeling like he was leaving the art world
for swamp was because he had this very big show.
(28:25):
And you know, we never really left New York because
we got a place in Brooklyn a few years later
and we started. We spent six months there in six
months here, so he was in New York I would
say until really until he was in his nineties. We
were back and forth.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
We'll be right back. Over the course of their long
marriage that began so improbably Arnold and Jill's mother become
good friends their contemporaries. After all, Arnold is exactly Jill's
(29:12):
father's age and her mom is six years younger. And
then it comes to pass that both Arnold and Jill's
mother are diagnosed with the same very aggressive cancer, acute
maalloyd leukemia.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Obviously, when I first started seeing him, my mother was
horrified and I was so ordering, so you know, strong headed.
There was nothing she could do to stop me. But
as any mother I think would be scared for their
daughter to be dating a married man thirty years older
than her. But they ended up becoming good friends. He
(29:50):
was the longest standing mayor in my family, so he
became the head of the Hushold until my mother finally
married again. And I think they worked in their own way.
They were very good friends. They talked a lot, and
I think that one of the reasons that I went
and got Arnold as a partner was to give my
(30:12):
family a male figure that was competent in there and
someone that we could rely on. I think people make
those choices all the time in marriage. There was a
really interesting article that somebody had written when consent came out.
She was a Muslim who had been set up in
(30:33):
an arranged marriage when she was eighteen, and she compares
my story with her own, and there are so many similarities,
the idea of pleasing the family, of of it being
a family decision. It was very really amazing article because
you realize that even though we have these contemporary marriages
(30:53):
where we think we're making these choices as individuals for love, etc.
You know, if you look at the larger context of
our lives, you know we're not that different than the
old arranged marriages. You know, you marry a family, you
don't just marry a human being. And I think that
was very enlightening to me.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
And again, that's not something that you ever would have
entertained consciously, not a million years. Not only would you
not have entertained it consciously, but you would have been
sort of appalled at that idea.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Arnold is ninety three when he passes away, Jill is
sixty three.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
I knew my whole life that he would die before me,
unless I was in an accident or something horrifying befell me.
So I knew that I was going to go through this,
and it was something that I had really thought about
how I would manage this, and so in a certain sense,
not that I was prepared, but I think people who
(31:55):
take their loved ones through a long illness or case
just old age, I think that you go through your
mourning before the person dies a lot. You know, in
many ways, his death was a relief, you know, because
(32:18):
it was getting harder and harder to take care of him.
And I think that kind of relief is not uncommon
for anyone who's been a caregiver. And so, you know,
suddenly I found myself at sixty three, you know, trying
to realize what I had feared my whole life. And
(32:40):
it was very different than I thought it was going
to be. I mean, it was sadder and less sad.
I had listened to many widows and the one thing
I took away from all their comments was if they
lost their husbands early enough, meaning in their sixties, they
(33:02):
regretted not trying to seek out love again, and I
was determined not to do that. So I sought out
love again. And you know, I guess I feel like
I was kind of prepared for his death in a
way that very few people get to be And you know,
taking him to death was really truly one of the
(33:23):
most extraordinary things I've ever I can imagine a human
being can do. When I was starting consent and my
husband was dead and the Me Too movement had made
me think it would have been an impossible affair to
have today, so I thought, let's try and revisit it
from today's perspective. And as I did, I started to
(33:45):
realize that he's the one who actually kissed me. First.
He drew me to him and he kissed me. And
I know that's true in terms of memory, because that's
what I fantasized about for months afterwards. It was so
thrilling to me when I was in New York and
having a miserable time, that kiss was something that really
(34:10):
extended past a regular memory. And so, you know, when
I originally wrote Half a Life, I don't really know
why I felt compelled to tell it in that one way.
I think I thought I was telling the truth. I
mean a lot of times memories are so vague, and
so sometimes when you're writing, the truth about a memory
(34:33):
is not so much accuracy, but what you're trying to portray.
You know, when you recreate scenes from your childhood and
you put in dialogue, it's not real. It's not that
you actually have some sort of, you know, amazing memory
that you can actually do all those things. What you're
doing is you're groping through a vague memory and you're
(34:56):
trying to make it sound true to your understanding of
that memory. So I think when I started the first memoir,
my understanding of that kiss was I really wanted it.
That's a truth. And so when I was writing it
this time, I thought that that's what inspired the whole book.
(35:18):
I thought, WHOA, I didn't tell the truth, and why
wouldn't I have done that? I mean, nobody was condemning
our marriage at that point. We've been married for twenty
five years. It was more like I wanted in one
draft to tell the truth as I remembered it then,
(35:39):
and in the second raft. I mean, maybe I'm delusional now.
I mean part of me thinks said, if I should
live to be ninety, god forbid, I can still write
Heavens forbid. Okay, And I were to approach this book again,
I may not revisit the kiss, but I certainly would
revisit the end of the book and what it was
(36:01):
like to be married to a man thirty years older,
because I have a feeling that when I live through
the next twenty years, I'll have a very different perspective
on that part of the book, right.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
And you know, I've often said to students that I
think of really interesting life's work as a writer would
be to write the same memoir every decade.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
Then, you know, that's what I had always planned. When
I finished Half a Life. I remember telling my editor,
you know, I'm going to revisit this again because it's
more interesting to keep revisiting the same thing to kind
of go on. But I never had an angle on it.
You know, It's one thing to have an idea, but
you know what would make me tell the story differently?
(36:43):
And finally, you know, between my husband's death and the
me to movement, I had that angle, And that's how
why I ended up doing the book. Did Arnold cross
the line by kissing the sixteen year old air and
looking down her blouse and telling her I wish you
were older? Yeah, he crossed the law of lines, Okay,
(37:04):
but they were lines that at that moment in my life,
I wanted him to cross, to go back, and to
look at it from another perspective. It leaves a kind
of sword life. But I can tell you that as
someone who lived through it, it never felt sword. You know.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
There's a phrase that's floating through my mind right now
that I learned in the last bunch of years. It's
it's sort of an ethical term, but retrospective moral judgment.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
That's a very interesting term.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
How do you define it judging the past by the
standards of the present. I mean, there's a moment in
there's a moment in consent where you write there are
two voices in every memoir, old and young, and you know,
you go on to talk about you know, like the
young voice is a simple trick that you wrote about
(37:54):
in Half a Life. I took self reflection out of
the equation. The young voice doesn't reflect, it reacts. There's
the self that is almost sort of reaching out a
hand the present self, or from the platform of the
present to that younger self. But I'm thinking, like the
(38:15):
question of I guess it has to do with the
question of judgment. And one of the things that I
thought was so beautiful and consent is that even though
it is clear eyed, and you're kind of unblinking when
you're looking at that time through this lens. But the
layers in which if you're judging, it's sort of like
(38:37):
society's judging, like present society judging, not the Jill who
lived through this long and beautiful and complicated and rich
marriage with this man.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
However, there is a judgmental quality that came for me
because I've also been teaching the the past forty years.
And if you think I haven't gone across the same
situation as a professor that I experienced as a young girl,
I mean I've had to stand up for young women.
The culture of men and women sleeping together professors with students,
(39:19):
as everyone knows, was really prevalent, and even you know today,
as I taught and we start taking these sexual harassment tests.
As I was taking one one year, I thought, WHOA,
what if it just changed the name from the Dalling
and Sam to Arnold and Jill. And that's another reason
that I started to think about it. I guess I
(39:43):
wanted to approach the story with no judgment because I
had no ranker. I had a lovely marriage, so I
wanted to approach it without that kind of contemporary judgment.
But it's impossible to because now I am a woman
alive at this particular time. It was a very complex
(40:05):
thing to try and do because there is judgment in it,
and then there is forgiveness or acceptance. I think that
human relationships are really complex. I mean, I wrote this
in the book. I really believe that the way a
story ends changes the way you see the beginning. Had
(40:27):
Arnold not left his wife, had he been a cruel person.
And remember, it's not like I was some kind of
great judge of character that I chose a good man. Okay,
I was a child. I had no idea what I
was choosing. I got lucky, and so I am able
to look at this long relationship without bitterness. But I
(40:47):
don't know if that would be true if it had
ended up in a different way. I guess what I'm
saying is that I think that there is no consistent
truth in life. They did a survey with fourteen hundred
women and they were fourteen years old, and they took
the Brigsmeyer test, and they interviewed people who knew them
(41:09):
to get certain personality types, and they found all those
women again at seventy eight the ones who were alive,
and they retook those tests, and it turned out their
personality and nothing in common with the personalities of their youth.
People are in constant flux and change, and I think
that that's as much of a truth as trying to
(41:32):
find that nugget of truth that therapy promises us or
somewhere inside of us, which I don't believe. I believe
that you know the truth is shifting, and that's part
of what that constant change in terms of who you
are and how you see life as kind of the
most exciting part of life.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
Here's Jill reading one last passage from her Searching and
Fearless memoir Consent.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
Had Arnold lived to read the page's I am now writing,
what would he have made of them? But in the
last memoir you said you wrote that you kissed me.
That was a reconsideration. I would have said, all art
is a reconsideration, he would have said. Had Arnold experienced
(42:30):
the sea change of the meat too error, would he
have come to believe that he had crossed the line
when he first kissed me? Does the story's ending excuse
its beginning? Does a kiss in one moment mean something else?
Entirely five decades later, Can the love that starts with
(42:50):
such an asymmetrical balance of power ever write itself? Family
Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zaccur is the
(43:11):
story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If
you have a family secret you'd like to share, please
leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on
an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight eight
Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find
me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd like
(43:33):
to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
I'm fairly certain that it was I who seduced him
that afternoon, But would I have if he had not
kissed me first? Am I as delusional as Humbered? Humbered?
When he narrates Lolita was twelve at the time, it
was she who seduced me. In both scenes from the memoir,
(00:28):
Arnold is passive, either lost in thought or asleep when
I appear like a nymph in the forest. There is
empowerment in remembering oneself as his sexual aggressor, especially after
modeling at Escapades. But I don't believe that was my
motivation when I wrote this? Was I protecting Arnold? The
(00:49):
statute of limitations had long ago past. Was I protecting
my marriage? We had just celebrated our twenty seventh anniversary.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
That's Jill Cement, novelist, memoirist, professor of English at the
University of Florida in Gainesville, an author of two memoirs,
Half a Life and Consent, written more than twenty five
years apart. These books are an extraordinary testament to the
secrets we keep from ourselves and the way the passage
(01:23):
of time informs our memories and our understanding of the past.
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets
(01:44):
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and yes, the secrets we keep from ourselves.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
I was born in Canada to a kind of middle
clas last Jewish family. My father's parents were more educated
than my mother's and were from a much higher class,
and they got married under the circumstances that people get
married under in those days. She wanted to get out
(02:17):
of the house and not work for her father, and
he was strange, and they got married. And so I
grew up in this kind of milieu of you know,
old Montreal, very very close knit Jewish community, almost deadly
in its insularity. Then when I was about ten, we
(02:38):
immigrated to the United States, to Los Angeles. We were
able to immigrate because my grandfather had applied for the lottery.
My father was ill prepared for it, he was autistic,
and my mother was just dying to escape Montreal. So
we came up there, and then, you know, my father
(03:00):
couldn't adjust to immigration, my mother was thrilled to be
in California. They eventually get divorced and we fall about
three or four classes down to the lower class because
I'm now the child of a single parent, and so
I grew up, you know, from the age of fourteen on.
I had a full time job and I helped support
(03:23):
the family. And that's kind of my background. I mean,
it was an unusual teenage shood because I had a
full time job. I was rushed into adulthood very early.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
And this would have been when you moved with your
family to LA This would have been in the late
nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
You know. I mean my parents got divorced when I
was about fourteen, and so it'd have been like sixty seven,
and so it sort of, you know, kind of went
along with the late sixties and seventies, which was a
sort of wild time, especially in Los Angeles.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
And do you have several brothers.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
I have three brothers. One is older than me and
we're almost like twins. His name is Gary. And then
I have a brother named James, who is five years
younger than me. And then there was the family mistake. Scott.
He was born just as my mother had saved up
enough money to divorce my father, and we had been
holding our breath for this moment of escape. And she
(04:25):
finds out she's pregnant and that you gave us another
two years. Under his strange authoritarianism, my father was sort
of like if you've ever seen rain Man, the Dustin
Hoffman character. He was able to kind of hold everything
together when we were in Montreal because he had an
extended family and everything was a routine. But once he
(04:48):
got to California, the pressure of not having his routine
just put him over the edge. And it was like
living with somebody who was in world in a constant terror.
If something was out of place and if money was spent,
it was like a black cloud of worries and craziness.
(05:09):
And so yeah, we all were very aware of it,
and we all wanted to escape it. And my mom
she was one of these women who you know, had
never even paid a bill. She didn't learn any of
those skills of how to survive. So when she wanted
to leave my father, we really had to think about
how we would survive. And my older brother and I
(05:29):
need a commitment that we would help her because there
was no other way. She wasn't prepared, as we weren't either,
and we all sort of figured it out together.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
When it's time for high school, Jill goes about three
days a week. Then on Friday mornings, she bore a
flight to different spots around the country because she has
a job, not a typical teenage job like bagging groceries
or scooping ice cream. No, this is a marketing research job.
Become was an emancipated miner, so she can sign contracts.
(06:03):
She's helping to support her family. At the same time,
she takes art classes on Monday nights because she's known
since the age of three that this is what she
wants to be. An artist.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
That's what I wanted to be. That's why I wasn't
too concerned about finishing high school. You know, I didn't
see how that was going to really help me become
an artist, which is insane because you know, the perspective
of a fifteen year old is hardly to be agreed with.
And that was a terrible student, and so it wasn't
like such a loss. My brother, who also worked full
time and did everything, managed to finish with straight a's
(06:38):
and go on to college. So it had as much
to do with my personality as it did with the circumstances.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
So tell me about at sixteen, you go to an
art show, a gallery show, and are drawn to the
work a particular work by an artist. Tell me about
that moment.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Well, actually he had the work in his wife's gallery
right the Pajer. Arnold Meshi's had some artwork in a
gallery and I had seen it in the window when
I was driving by, was on Ventura Boulevard, and you know,
I just had not seen that level of draftsmanship outside
of museums. And I was just dumbstruck because I'd only
(07:19):
seen that kind of like crappy art of seascapes, and
you know, I just hadn't you know. I thought that
was like living art, and then dead art was the
art you saw in the museum. And suddenly I realized, no,
there's an entire world of that outside, and I became
riveted by it. And so I had my mom call
the gallery and speak to Arnold's wife and see if
(07:42):
he would teach a fourteen you know, at the time,
I probably was sixteen, if I could go into a
life drawing class. So I changed from a lesser teacher
to him, and I started studying under Arnold.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
And these were existing classes, a group classes.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Yeah, they were private classes. Mostly there were as older
people in it. They were retirees, a few younger people,
but he had a studio, a kind of classroom in
Beverly Hills where he taught these classes near his studio.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
What comes to mind, like what language comes to mind
when it comes to first being sort of under Arnold's
tutelage and being part of these classes. What was he
to you initially?
Speaker 2 (08:24):
I mean, you know, first, he was the first real
artist that I had encountered, and it was what I
wanted to do. It's so confusing at that age. I mean,
you know, I wanted to win his approval. I was
enamored with him as a girl would have a crush
on someone. I really felt incredibly grown up to be
(08:48):
a part of a life drawing class where there was
nudity and people talked openly about genitalia in the context
of draftsmanship. It's pretty different than high school. And I
mean I wanted to be an artist since I was
like three years old. So it was this thing that
I wanted and I suddenly had access to it, and
(09:13):
it was thrilling. I was flirting with him and was trying,
in my own clumsy, sixteen year old way to be seducted.
I could see I was arresting his attention, and I
approach him and I kiss him.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
It's nineteen seventy. Jill is sixteen and Arnold is forty seven.
This is the year she kisses him, at least that's
how she chronicles it when she writes her first memoir,
Half of Life, published in nineteen ninety six. That book
exists as a sort of forensic evidence of what Jill
(09:52):
believed and remembered at a certain time. But time moves forward,
and with it, our perspectives, our memory are truths. Jill's
new memoir, Consent, begins and ends with this very kiss.
In Half a Life, the kiss is portrayed one way,
and in Consent it's portrayed another way. Who really kissed
(10:17):
who first? But long before she reflects on this, she
lives this. Jill and Arnold have this meaningful kiss in
nineteen seventy, but a relationship doesn't begin just yet. First,
she goes to New York.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
I arrived there with one hundred and fifty dollars that
I had saved up and the name of somebody where
he had a crash pad where I and my brother
could go and spend a couple of nights where we
tried to figure out how to survive in New York.
My brother was only going for a week to make
sure I wasn't going to be killed. Well, you know,
I started out there, and you know, it was an
(10:57):
impossible thing to do. I mean, I ended up drifting
off with a bunch of other runaways. And although I
was not a runaway, it was the early seventies in
New York City and it was you know, you can't
become an artist that way, and that was the lesson
I had to learn.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
And during those months, this memory of Arnold and Arnold's
kind of presence for you lingered. We wrote back and forth.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
He wrote me letters not I mean they were letters
that if somebody found them, it wouldn't look like we
had kissed. They were the letters of a student to
a professor and vice versa, and giving me advice on
how to survive there. But he kept promising he was
going to come to New York. I think that's why
I hung on for four months, because he always went
(11:47):
to New York as an artist. And then, you know,
I went back to Los Angeles. I took a greyhound bus.
My mother didn't even have enough money to send the airfare,
so I went back on a greyhound bus, and you know,
I was so depressed, and the only thing I would
do is I would drive past this house. You know.
(12:08):
I was love worn and I you know, and finally
one day I just built up the nerve to just
show up at his studio. And I had lost my virginity.
That was a big thing. And I went to a
studio and I tried to seduce him, which wasn't that hard.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
And that's how we began off Here, as Jill drives
in circles past Arnold's house, imagining him with his wife
of twenty five years and his two kids inside, there
may also have been the specter of her own father,
who was profoundly absent because of his autism, and then
(12:44):
literally absent, just gone. So her feelings about Arnold would
have been complicated. They're romantic and sexual, to be sure,
but that longing she feels has many layers. It's shortly
after her return to Los Angelus that their affair begins
in earnest.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
I mean, it was so many things on the way
in which one conceives of one's life. I think the
yearning was simply I think I was just so curious
to know what it would be like to be loved
by an older man. I think that was my big curiosity,
and I think that's what I sought out. And you know,
(13:25):
not only was art Old an older man, but he
was an artist. And you know, in those days, the
only person who could anoint you an artist was a
male artist. And you weren't going to be anointed by
a woman. At that point. There were no women artists
that you even saw. And so, you know, part of
that whole patriarchal thing was so bred into us that
(13:48):
the yearning to become successful only could be gotten through
the approval of a man, and there was no other
way in those days. Well, I came back from New York.
I just turned seventeen. I came back, and so I
started seeing him again a little bit before my eighteenth birthday,
(14:09):
and we started seeing each other in an illicit affair,
or as I put it in the book, I was
going steady and he was having an affair. And you know,
I was very open with My mother knew about it.
And again it was the seventies. She was also dating
a man named Arnold who was like ten years younger
than her, and even though she was very upset about it.
(14:30):
You know, there was a kind of laughter to it
as well, because that was kind of funny. And then
it was New Year's Eve and I just fell apart
in New Year's Eve because you know, I was eighteen
years old and I wanted to be on a date
for New Year's Eve and he was married, and you know,
at an adult party, and I just broke down and he,
(14:53):
I don't know, he left his wife. I mean, it's
such an unusual thing that happens. He left his wife.
He left with just toothbrush, she left the house, all
the money in the bank. We just started off together,
and I guess I had just turned eighteen, and I remember,
you know, at this point, I you know again, I
(15:13):
had just gotten into cal Arts as a student and
I got a scholarship and so I started my art
school education and he kind of returned to painting, and
so we started living together from that point forward. So
he went he was with me all throughout college, and
(15:34):
you know, it gave me obviously a very different version
of college. But you know, he kind of went to
college with me, and I think it revitalized him as
well in one sense. When I was enamored of him
as a seventeen year old girl and starting my affair,
I thought of him as a famous, successful artist, looking
(15:57):
back at it as a seventy one year old and
seeing that this was a man in his late forties
who hadn't succeeded as an artist in the way he
wanted to, and that, you know, he was not what
I thought he was. But because he wasn't what I
thought he was, this all powerful man, I went from
(16:22):
being enamored with him to seeing him as a vulnerable
human being. And I think that's what was able to
allow me to actually love him as opposed to always
be under his thumb of power. It was that he
wasn't the person I imagined him to be that allowed me
(16:42):
to fall in love with him. And I think that's
something that you know, when a young girl looks at
a powerful matter, what they assume is a powerful man,
and they don't see that, you know, all human beings
are fallible and filled with doubt and remorse in all
other emotions. And it was only as I started to
learn who Ornold actually was just a human being, that
(17:06):
I think the relationship went from what would be now
kind of risky and grooming into something much more like
any other marriage.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
And also likely the reason why the marriage lasted when
it was a relationship early on, where his colleagues were
literally placing bets on how long this was going to last.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
At what point did you make the switch from being
an artist to becoming a writer and why?
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Why? Is the question that has plagued me my whole life.
I have no idea, but I thought a great deal
about it. I made the switch. I was in graduate
school at Cal Arts. I had ten weeks left. I
had finished my DCS, which was a film. I was
going to become a kind of gudared like, you know, filmmaker,
and that film really made me realize that I can't
(18:06):
work with human beings, so that wasn't be a good
profession for me, and so I decided, I don't know,
I loved literature, and I just decided I would instead
of making a film and having to spend all that
money and work with people, I would just write my
films down. And at the time, I honestly had probably
(18:26):
never even written somebody a letter. I mean, I just
was so dyslexic, and it was such a weird choice
for me. Because I had. It wasn't like I had
any talent at this, and you know, I just made
this crazy decision. I dropped out of school. I sat down,
(18:47):
and I spent the next literally four years, I mean,
when I wasn't working, you know, practicing how to make
a sentence, studying literature. Arnold as this great gift bought
me the entire election of Norton Critical Edition, and I
was able to read my you know, I read from
gilganish for it and gave myself this huge education and
(19:10):
you know, practice becoming a writer. And that's how I
did it. And you know what, I had been able
to do it without the supporter of somebody like Arnold?
Probably not, but I you know, he was there and
he encouraged me to take this crazy journey.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Is there any part of you that feels like you
made the switch because you didn't want to directly compete
with him.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Oh, I'm sure. I mean I had already left painting
and drawing early, probably because I didn't want to compete
with him, and I had gone into conceptual art, so
I wasn't It wasn't like we were really overlapping in
esthetics and craft. But I'm sure I went over to
conceptual art, probably mostly because I was just enamored by
(19:55):
the idea of the auvant garde. I mean, it was
just like so big and I I think what happened
is it became nauseous with the app on guard and
it just seemed like such a it was so removed
from everyday people. I just didn't want to make art
for only wealthy people. So I didn't want to do
that anymore. I probably would have returned to painting, because
(20:15):
that is a history of something beyond that. But Arnold
was there, and he was already painting, and I think
that blocked that possible door. But I don't know if
I would have taken it anyhow. We were an incredibly
collaborative couple. He read every word that I wrote, and
(20:36):
I remember when I wrote my first book, he told
me to throw up the first fifty pages. I remember
having like a complete like conniption fit and crying and
tearing up paper and just you know, like as a
lunatic would do in their twenties, filled with hormones and ambition,
and you know, I would do the same thing to
(20:56):
his work. So it's you know, I would go in
and tell him this was horrible. That was we just
did it. We just were like completely, we collaborate. I
think one of the reasons that I never felt such
a great desire to return into painting was that I
kind of got to paint through him. And you know,
he had written some novels himself, and I think he
(21:18):
got to become a writer through me. And you know,
it was one of these marriages that were very much
involved in each other's work in a good way.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
I think we'll be back in a moment with more
family secrets. When Jill is twenty nine and Arnold is sixty,
(21:53):
he's made a painting that a gallery owner in New
York expresses interest in. But the gallery owner is on
the fence because she hasn't actually seen it, only slides.
So Jill encourages Arnold to roll up the painting and
they traveled to New York.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Unfortunately, the gallery didn't realize how old Arnold was. They
thought he was a kid, and so when they saw
his age, you know, they lost interest in wanting to
invest in somebody who's sixty, who really doesn't have the
long term investment range that you are looking for. And
(22:29):
so I convinced him to go over to the East Village,
which I had heard was kind of like a new
art scene, and you know, he stumbled into this gallery
with these young, amazing curators and he began a career
as an East Village artist. And you know, at the
same time, I was just beginning, you know, to become
a writer. So it was really I'd gotten an agent
(22:53):
and I was starting. So it was a moment when
we both moved to New York. Was the mid eighties,
It was you know, New York was really on fire
in terms of both literature and or something you don't
feel today when you're in New York.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
Jill and Arnold spend the next twenty years living in
New York. They continue to write and make art, and
their relationship remains deeply collaborative, but Jill is becoming increasingly
aware of their age gap, which during this time almost
seems to widen. A once vital, vibrant middle aged man,
(23:30):
Arnold is slowing down and becoming more physically vulnerable as
he ages.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
New York is a difficult place for old people. One
we lived in a five flight walk home, which became
the subject of one of my books because it was
insurmountable you know, it's an old person. If you end
up in a walk up, you are as trapped there
as you would be on the Kansas farm in the
middle of nowhere, you know, unable to drive. I mean,
(23:57):
so I knew as he was hitting eighty, I had
to come up with another plan. And so you know,
I ended up applying for teaching jobs and came down
here to Florida. But again, you know now that I'm
entering the age that Arnold had entered when I started
to notice an age, And now I'm in that place.
(24:21):
There are moments when I think about what I asked
him to do when he was in his seventies, like
travel with backpacks around Malaysia. We went around the world
to these remote islands. He just you know, tried to
keep up with me. And at seventy I realized, oh
my god. Like I remember when we would get to
(24:43):
New York. We had a place in New York, and
we would arrive and we'd have all these we had
the dog and all the suitcases, and I would throw
them down and I'd say, come on, let's take a
long walk. And he would say, oh, honey, I want
to lie down. I'm really tired. And I'd say, come on,
you only live one and I'd like force this old
man to walk around. So it's kind of an interesting
(25:05):
It's now I think about our relationship and I really
think about what it would have been like to be
here with such energy, you know, asking you to live
a life of somebody who's twenty five years younger, thirty
years younger.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Does that fall for you in some way into the
category of a secret that you were keeping from yourself
during that time, which was that he really was, that
you were asking of him something that was almost impossible
for him to do, or that you know that he
was getting old. I mean, he had this.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Vibrancy he did. He had a vibrancy in the end.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
And he was he never stopped working, and you know
this was not you know, sometimes people will say to
artists and writers, people who have regular jobs will talk
about retirement and kind of ask you when you're going
to retire, And you know, I think for artists and
writers we look at that question like never, never, with
some notable exceptions. But you know, he wasn't going to retire,
(26:06):
and he wasn't going to stop his work, and he
wasn't going to go gently, But was there a sense
on your part. Was there an awareness at that time
or is the awareness more what you have in retrospect.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
Only in retrospect you can see it when you went
on with people. There's no way to understand what it's
like to be in a body that suddenly feels finite
after having spent your life in the body that seemed infinite.
I think it's a secret everybody holds from themselves, like
(26:38):
he that's you know. I think the secret we all
hold from ourselves is that we're not going to die,
or you know, that's our secret is that we think
we're immortal. And until you understand that, and you only
understand it as you start to see your generation end
that you know, I think that, I mean, I think
(27:00):
it's the biggest secret we all keep from ourselves.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
Now, Jill's fifty and Arnold is eighty, and an extraordinary
thing happens. Arnold has a moment, a big moment as
an artist, and it begins with Jill sending away for
his FBI files. He makes art out of those files,
an illuminated manuscript, and has a one man show. This
(27:28):
late success makes it more palatable when Jill wants them
to move to Florida, where she gets a teaching job,
Florida being an easier place to be old.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
At that time, almost all the old lefties were sending
away for their files. It was I remember Grace Paley
came as a visiting writer, and I was trying to
show her alligators, because you can see alligators from my backyard,
and she wasn't interested. She was much more interested in
Arnold's FBI files because she had just sent away for hers,
and so it was kind of like this kind of
(28:01):
crazy time. So he may have sent away for it,
but he got discouraged about what he could do with them,
and I encouraged him to keep going. So I feel
responsible for those. It's an amazing series and he I mean,
I think one reason he was able to leave New
York without feeling like he was leaving the art world
for swamp was because he had this very big show.
(28:25):
And you know, we never really left New York because
we got a place in Brooklyn a few years later
and we started. We spent six months there in six
months here, so he was in New York I would
say until really until he was in his nineties. We
were back and forth.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
We'll be right back. Over the course of their long
marriage that began so improbably Arnold and Jill's mother become
good friends their contemporaries. After all, Arnold is exactly Jill's
(29:12):
father's age and her mom is six years younger. And
then it comes to pass that both Arnold and Jill's
mother are diagnosed with the same very aggressive cancer, acute
maalloyd leukemia.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Obviously, when I first started seeing him, my mother was
horrified and I was so ordering, so you know, strong headed.
There was nothing she could do to stop me. But
as any mother I think would be scared for their
daughter to be dating a married man thirty years older
than her. But they ended up becoming good friends. He
(29:50):
was the longest standing mayor in my family, so he
became the head of the Hushold until my mother finally
married again. And I think they worked in their own way.
They were very good friends. They talked a lot, and
I think that one of the reasons that I went
and got Arnold as a partner was to give my
(30:12):
family a male figure that was competent in there and
someone that we could rely on. I think people make
those choices all the time in marriage. There was a
really interesting article that somebody had written when consent came out.
She was a Muslim who had been set up in
(30:33):
an arranged marriage when she was eighteen, and she compares
my story with her own, and there are so many similarities,
the idea of pleasing the family, of of it being
a family decision. It was very really amazing article because
you realize that even though we have these contemporary marriages
(30:53):
where we think we're making these choices as individuals for love, etc.
You know, if you look at the larger context of
our lives, you know we're not that different than the
old arranged marriages. You know, you marry a family, you
don't just marry a human being. And I think that
was very enlightening to me.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
And again, that's not something that you ever would have
entertained consciously, not a million years. Not only would you
not have entertained it consciously, but you would have been
sort of appalled at that idea.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Arnold is ninety three when he passes away, Jill is
sixty three.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
I knew my whole life that he would die before me,
unless I was in an accident or something horrifying befell me.
So I knew that I was going to go through this,
and it was something that I had really thought about
how I would manage this, and so in a certain sense,
not that I was prepared, but I think people who
(31:55):
take their loved ones through a long illness or case
just old age, I think that you go through your
mourning before the person dies a lot. You know, in
many ways, his death was a relief, you know, because
(32:18):
it was getting harder and harder to take care of him.
And I think that kind of relief is not uncommon
for anyone who's been a caregiver. And so, you know,
suddenly I found myself at sixty three, you know, trying
to realize what I had feared my whole life. And
(32:40):
it was very different than I thought it was going
to be. I mean, it was sadder and less sad.
I had listened to many widows and the one thing
I took away from all their comments was if they
lost their husbands early enough, meaning in their sixties, they
(33:02):
regretted not trying to seek out love again, and I
was determined not to do that. So I sought out
love again. And you know, I guess I feel like
I was kind of prepared for his death in a
way that very few people get to be And you know,
taking him to death was really truly one of the
(33:23):
most extraordinary things I've ever I can imagine a human
being can do. When I was starting consent and my
husband was dead and the Me Too movement had made
me think it would have been an impossible affair to
have today, so I thought, let's try and revisit it
from today's perspective. And as I did, I started to
(33:45):
realize that he's the one who actually kissed me. First.
He drew me to him and he kissed me. And
I know that's true in terms of memory, because that's
what I fantasized about for months afterwards. It was so
thrilling to me when I was in New York and
having a miserable time, that kiss was something that really
(34:10):
extended past a regular memory. And so, you know, when
I originally wrote Half a Life, I don't really know
why I felt compelled to tell it in that one way.
I think I thought I was telling the truth. I
mean a lot of times memories are so vague, and
so sometimes when you're writing, the truth about a memory
(34:33):
is not so much accuracy, but what you're trying to portray.
You know, when you recreate scenes from your childhood and
you put in dialogue, it's not real. It's not that
you actually have some sort of, you know, amazing memory
that you can actually do all those things. What you're
doing is you're groping through a vague memory and you're
(34:56):
trying to make it sound true to your understanding of
that memory. So I think when I started the first memoir,
my understanding of that kiss was I really wanted it.
That's a truth. And so when I was writing it
this time, I thought that that's what inspired the whole book.
(35:18):
I thought, WHOA, I didn't tell the truth, and why
wouldn't I have done that? I mean, nobody was condemning
our marriage at that point. We've been married for twenty
five years. It was more like I wanted in one
draft to tell the truth as I remembered it then,
(35:39):
and in the second raft. I mean, maybe I'm delusional now.
I mean part of me thinks said, if I should
live to be ninety, god forbid, I can still write
Heavens forbid. Okay, And I were to approach this book again,
I may not revisit the kiss, but I certainly would
revisit the end of the book and what it was
(36:01):
like to be married to a man thirty years older,
because I have a feeling that when I live through
the next twenty years, I'll have a very different perspective
on that part of the book, right.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
And you know, I've often said to students that I
think of really interesting life's work as a writer would
be to write the same memoir every decade.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
Then, you know, that's what I had always planned. When
I finished Half a Life. I remember telling my editor,
you know, I'm going to revisit this again because it's
more interesting to keep revisiting the same thing to kind
of go on. But I never had an angle on it.
You know, It's one thing to have an idea, but
you know what would make me tell the story differently?
(36:43):
And finally, you know, between my husband's death and the
me to movement, I had that angle, And that's how
why I ended up doing the book. Did Arnold cross
the line by kissing the sixteen year old air and
looking down her blouse and telling her I wish you
were older? Yeah, he crossed the law of lines, Okay,
(37:04):
but they were lines that at that moment in my life,
I wanted him to cross, to go back, and to
look at it from another perspective. It leaves a kind
of sword life. But I can tell you that as
someone who lived through it, it never felt sword. You know.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
There's a phrase that's floating through my mind right now
that I learned in the last bunch of years. It's
it's sort of an ethical term, but retrospective moral judgment.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
That's a very interesting term.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
How do you define it judging the past by the
standards of the present. I mean, there's a moment in
there's a moment in consent where you write there are
two voices in every memoir, old and young, and you know,
you go on to talk about you know, like the
young voice is a simple trick that you wrote about
(37:54):
in Half a Life. I took self reflection out of
the equation. The young voice doesn't reflect, it reacts. There's
the self that is almost sort of reaching out a
hand the present self, or from the platform of the
present to that younger self. But I'm thinking, like the
(38:15):
question of I guess it has to do with the
question of judgment. And one of the things that I
thought was so beautiful and consent is that even though
it is clear eyed, and you're kind of unblinking when
you're looking at that time through this lens. But the
layers in which if you're judging, it's sort of like
(38:37):
society's judging, like present society judging, not the Jill who
lived through this long and beautiful and complicated and rich
marriage with this man.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
However, there is a judgmental quality that came for me
because I've also been teaching the the past forty years.
And if you think I haven't gone across the same
situation as a professor that I experienced as a young girl,
I mean I've had to stand up for young women.
The culture of men and women sleeping together professors with students,
(39:19):
as everyone knows, was really prevalent, and even you know today,
as I taught and we start taking these sexual harassment tests.
As I was taking one one year, I thought, WHOA,
what if it just changed the name from the Dalling
and Sam to Arnold and Jill. And that's another reason
that I started to think about it. I guess I
(39:43):
wanted to approach the story with no judgment because I
had no ranker. I had a lovely marriage, so I
wanted to approach it without that kind of contemporary judgment.
But it's impossible to because now I am a woman
alive at this particular time. It was a very complex
(40:05):
thing to try and do because there is judgment in it,
and then there is forgiveness or acceptance. I think that
human relationships are really complex. I mean, I wrote this
in the book. I really believe that the way a
story ends changes the way you see the beginning. Had
(40:27):
Arnold not left his wife, had he been a cruel person.
And remember, it's not like I was some kind of
great judge of character that I chose a good man. Okay,
I was a child. I had no idea what I
was choosing. I got lucky, and so I am able
to look at this long relationship without bitterness. But I
(40:47):
don't know if that would be true if it had
ended up in a different way. I guess what I'm
saying is that I think that there is no consistent
truth in life. They did a survey with fourteen hundred
women and they were fourteen years old, and they took
the Brigsmeyer test, and they interviewed people who knew them
(41:09):
to get certain personality types, and they found all those
women again at seventy eight the ones who were alive,
and they retook those tests, and it turned out their
personality and nothing in common with the personalities of their youth.
People are in constant flux and change, and I think
that that's as much of a truth as trying to
(41:32):
find that nugget of truth that therapy promises us or
somewhere inside of us, which I don't believe. I believe
that you know the truth is shifting, and that's part
of what that constant change in terms of who you
are and how you see life as kind of the
most exciting part of life.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
Here's Jill reading one last passage from her Searching and
Fearless memoir Consent.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
Had Arnold lived to read the page's I am now writing,
what would he have made of them? But in the
last memoir you said you wrote that you kissed me.
That was a reconsideration. I would have said, all art
is a reconsideration, he would have said. Had Arnold experienced
(42:30):
the sea change of the meat too error, would he
have come to believe that he had crossed the line
when he first kissed me? Does the story's ending excuse
its beginning? Does a kiss in one moment mean something else?
Entirely five decades later, Can the love that starts with
(42:50):
such an asymmetrical balance of power ever write itself? Family
Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zaccur is the
(43:11):
story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If
you have a family secret you'd like to share, please
leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on
an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight eight
Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find
me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd like
(43:33):
to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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