Half a Life

A Memoir

Author  Jill Ciment
Half a Life

Unflinchingly honest, moving, and funny, Half a Life shows how a girl without means or promise and with only a loving mother, chutzpah, a bit of fraud, and a lot of luck turned into somebody. In 1964 the Ciment family left middle-class Montreal for the fringe desert communities of Los Angeles, where their always unstable father lost the last vestiges of his sanity. Terrified and broke, in a world he could neither understand nor control, he came apart. When the family finally threw him out, he lived for weeks in his car at the foot of their driveway.

Ciment turned herself into a girl for whom a father is unnecessary-a tough girl who survived any way she could. She and her…

$23.00
August 18, 1997
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