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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, 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 statute of limitations had long ago past. Was I protecting my marriage? We had just celebrated our twenty seventh anniversary.
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 of time informs our memories and our understanding of the past.
I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and yes, the secrets we keep from ourselves.
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 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 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 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 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.
And this would have been when you moved with your family to LA This would have been in the late nineteen sixties.
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.
And do you have several brothers.
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 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 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. 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 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.
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. 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.
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
and go on to college. So it had as much to do with my personality as it did with the circumstances.
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.
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 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 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.
And these were existing classes, a group classes.
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.
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?
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 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 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.
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 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 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.
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 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.
And during those months, this memory of Arnold and Arnold's kind of presence for you lingered. We wrote back and forth.
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 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. 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.
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 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.
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, 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 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, 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.
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, 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 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 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 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 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
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 I think the relationship went from what would be now kind of risky and grooming into something much more like any other marriage.
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.
Yeah. Absolutely.
At what point did you make the switch from being an artist to becoming a writer and why?
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 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
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, 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 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.
Is there any part of you that feels like you made the switch because you didn't want to directly compete with him.
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
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 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 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
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 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.
I think we'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. When Jill is twenty nine and Arnold is sixty, 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.
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 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 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.
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, Arnold is slowing down and becoming more physically vulnerable as he ages.
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, 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. 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
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 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.
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.
Vibrancy he did. He had a vibrancy in the end.
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, 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.
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 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 it's the biggest secret we all keep from ourselves.
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 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.
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 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. 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.
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 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.
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 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 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 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 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.
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.
Absolutely.
Arnold is ninety three when he passes away, Jill is sixty three.
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 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 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 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 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 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
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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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.
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.
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? 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, 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.
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.
That's a very interesting term.
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 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 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 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.
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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
Here's Jill reading one last passage from her Searching and Fearless memoir Consent.
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 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 such an asymmetrical balance of power ever write itself? Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly Zaccur is the 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 to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance.
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