Fresh Air - Best Of: A Novel Of Kidnapping & Family Trauma / Rethinking An Age-Gap Relationship

Episode Date: July 13, 2024

Taffy Brodesser-Akner's new novel, Long Island Compromise, centers on the kidnapping of a rich businessman, and the impact, decades later, on his grown children. Her previous book, Fleishman Is in Trouble, was adapted into an acclaimed FX/Hulu series.Jill Ciment met her husband in the 1970s when she was a teenager and he was almost 50. At the time of their first kiss, he was a married father of two; she was his art student. In her memoir Consent she reconsiders the origin story of their marriage.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Tanya Mosley with Fresh Air Weekend. Today, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, author of the novel Fleshman is in Trouble. In the opening of her new novel, she writes, Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending? What ensues is a dramatic tale in which wealth is a curse. The book is called Long Island Compromise,

and it tells the story of a businessman taken for ransom and the impact on his children decades later. Also, we hear from Jill Cement. Her new memoir is called Consent. It begins when she was 17, when she falls in love and has a sexual relationship with her married art teacher, who was 30 years older than her. Even though she wanted the relationship, Sumit now wonders if a 17-year-old is even capable of consent, and if in today's language, he would be considered a predator. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies.

Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Long Island Compromise, a new novel by Taffy Brodesser-Ackner, opens with a kidnapping. The year is 1980, and Carl Fletcher, a wealthy businessman, is taken for ransom from the driveway of his palatial home on Long Island. After his family pays the ransom, Carl returns to his wife and children, determined to continue with their privileged lives. Forty years later, however,

they're anything but normal. Anxiety, sex addiction, and depression have taken hold to all three of his children. And as their family fortune dwindles, it becomes clear that none of them have faced their family's biggest trauma. Long Island Compromise is Taffy Brodesser-Akner's second novel. She adapted her first best-selling book, Fleshman in Trouble, and to the FX on Hulu series under the same name, where she served as the writer, showrunner, and executive producer. Taffy is also a staff writer with the New York Times. Taffy Brodesser-Akner, welcome back to Fresh Air. It is so great to be here, Tanya. Thank you for having me. So Taffy, this book is loosely inspired by

something that really happened to someone that you grew up hearing about. Tell us a little bit about that. And what about that story, aside from it being really a big deal, captured your imagination? Well, I grew up knowing a man who was kidnapped. And because you're a child and you've sort of always known that story, it takes on different meaning for you as you get older. And then one day, I think this happens with any circumstance that you sort of wake up to, you suddenly understand, oh my God, I know someone who was kidnapped. But as I was growing up, it was a very regular thing that I knew that my father's friend, Jack Teich, had been kidnapped out of his driveway in 1974, held in a closet for a week and returned home safely for a ransom after a very harrowing rescue and ransom drop. And it was just something I always knew. Years and years later, I wanted to write a book about money. I did not write about the Teich family. I was writing a book about a sort of generic family with money because I was grappling with the question of

what money does to you. Does growing up with money and security make you kind of useless? And does growing up without it make you into someone who knows in her heart that she could survive if she had to? And which is better? Because when you were a child and you were hearing this story,

you were kind of ashamed to say it, but for a long time you weren't thinking, what an awful thing. You were thinking, imagine being rich enough to be kidnapped. Yes, that's what I would think, which is, you know, I am happy to report that my sense of compassion and empathy have grown over the years, but it was just a thing that I thought on occasion. And when I sat down to write this book, I could not help but use this kidnapping because what is better than a kidnapping to make the point that I wanted to make, which was there's no answer to that question because the money that made it so that you were kidnappable also brought you home. So which is it? Is it good or is it bad? And I loved the way the question sort of ate itself and you couldn't really answer it.

And that to me is sort of where I landed. This question also evolved and morphed because it had you thinking about your own life. You were asking yourself, is it better to come from money and never feel afraid or to be someone who had to become scrappy and survive? So take me to that time period when you were writing this and you were grappling with those questions because you actually wrote this before F Fleischman is in trouble. I started writing it before Fleischman is in trouble. I started writing it under the strangest circumstances. I was on a 12-day work trip to Russia for ESPN the magazine to cover the U.S.'s only male synchronized swimmer in his quest for Olympic gold. And ESPN had a high word rate. They were assigning the story at a great length. And we were in desperate need of the money. We had just moved from Los Angeles to New Jersey.

Because the word rate, just to explain this, the longer the piece, the more money you're going to make. The longer the piece, the more money you're going to make. And a magazine like ESPN, the magazine, which took long-form stories so seriously and had a good amount of money to give its writers, it was just this ideal thing. They assigned it at 8,000 words. It ran at 12,000. And it fixed a problem that we had, which was that when we moved to New Jersey, we started renting this house, and the landlord was sort of harassing us to leave. She kept wanting us out of the house. And awoken in Me was this sort of vestigial, primal, somebody is threatening my home. Why am I always in this position? And I felt like, you know what, we need to get ahead somehow. So I was going to write this story and make some money, which is

not a lot of money. It's just some money. And when you're a freelancer, which is not a lot of money. It's just some money. And when you're a freelancer, some money is a lot of money. And in Russia, the reason I was there for 12 days is because the events were on day one and day 12. So I had all this time in the middle to be miserable in this town in Russia with nothing else to do and to sit down and say, you know what? I am going to figure out a way to write about this. And I had 70 pages by the time I left Russia. 70 pages. The book is almost 500 pages. Is it true that there are 1,500 more pages that you cut? There are more than that. I will correct you and say that the book is 440 pages long, which is not almost 500. I said almost. Well, look.

It's closer to 500 than 300, let's say. But just for the reader who's considering what he or she wants to engage in. But you wrote with such fervor because it's a topic that you felt passionate about. And it also centers around so many things that you struggle with. You're asking yourself about wealth, but also around identity. And I want to get to that. But the book centers on the outcomes of Carl Fletcher's children, all of whom have been traumatized one way or another by Carl's kidnapping. There's Nathan, the oldest. He's a lawyer. He's passive and neurotic and full of anxiety. There's Bernard, aka Beamer. He's this reckless Hollywood screenwriter who reenacts his

father's kidnapping over and over in his scripts. And then there is Ginny. She's the youngest. She's the most conscious about the negative impacts of her family's wealth. And she's lost. She's not sure what value she contributes to the world. And because of that, she suffers from this debilitating depression. It is hard, Taffy, to feel sorry for rich people. And yet somehow you've actually done it with this book. Was it easy for you to get there, that level of compassion you needed to write in such a raw way? It was easy to get there in that I have a long history of writing about celebrities. And the circumstances of writing about a celebrity are that you show up to their home, or you show up to their jet, or you show up to their Ferrari, or you show up to their home or you show up to their jet or you show up to their Ferrari or you show up to their yacht.

And you have to write a story that isn't just about the unique circumstances of the fact that it's always a journalist, historically not a high-paying job, who is sent to do this. And you have to put that aside and figure out who the actual person is. And I think that that's the goal of all writing, is to humanize those that we can only see from far away, to bring them close and to make them into humans. But you are right that I started writing this before Fleischman. The problem I had was, and the reason I didn't finish it before Fleischman, was because I could not figure out the tone to take where you can look at these people, feel that kind of envy, and then also make your way into their human experience, which is not exactly as different as yours. How did you get there?

I got there by knowing that nobody wants to read a 440-page book where the writer has contempt for her subjects. I know that all writing is making a case for something. And what I wanted to make a case for, what I learned, was that I wasn't really writing a book about money, or I had told myself I was writing a book about money. I was writing a book about trauma. I was writing a book about what happens after something big happens. And the something big is either historical or it's still there. But either way, it hovers like an assassin in your home. And the trick is that if you look the assassin directly in the eye, it will kill you.

So you just walk around quietly, trying to pretend this assassin isn't there holding a gun over you. This makes me think about the last time we spoke. And I was asking you about the characters in Fleischman is in Trouble. And one in particular, one character in particular, that seemed to mirror your life in a lot of different ways. And you talked about how when you write, all of the characters are in essence you. They come from your mind, your experiences, and of course, the research that goes into making these people feel real based on who they are within the book. Do you ever find yourself not liking one of your characters, like literally feeling annoyed or tired by them?

I mean, I find myself not liking myself to just bring the question back around. Sure, all the time. But I don't really seek likability in people. I am surrounded by likable people. I work with likable people. I live with likable people. I live with likable people. That's great. But literature to me should not be a representation of the likable. It should be a representation of the real. So I guess I don't think they're less likable than I am. And I think I'm only sort of medium likable.

My guest is New York Times staff writer Taffy Brodiser-Ackner. She's written a new novel called Long Island Compromise. You'll hear more of our conversation after a break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Let's get back to my interview with Taffy Brodiser-Ackner. She's written a new novel called Long Island Compromise, and it's a story that's set in the 1980s, and it centers on a wealthy businessman who was kidnapped from his driveway in an affluent neighborhood on Long Island, brutalized and held

for ransom. He returns home to his wife and kids, and they all appear to move on with their lives until 40 years later, when it's apparent that no one has really gotten over it. Taffy Brodesser Ackner adapted her previous novel, Fleshman is in Trouble, into a limited FX series on Hulu. You've actually been teaching lately, right? You've been teaching a class at NYU, dramatic writing? I taught a dramatic writing class this year, yes, from the program I graduated from. Yeah, what's it like? Yeah, going back to your alma mater as this bona fide success, because you've talked about quite a bit in previous interviews, even the last time we talked about how teachers, their capstone class. And I would remember so much of what I was taught. And what I was taught, I think I maybe took the things I was taught too literally. I was trying to be obedient when I was writing screenplays right out of college. I was writing, you know, a romantic comedy with a clumsy but beautiful woman who doesn't know she's beautiful until she takes off her glasses and she

falls a lot. And like, who wanted that? I was trying to be obedient. But actually, the stakes in writing, especially as a new writer, are so low because nobody really cares that why don't you just do something original? It was actually writing journalism that taught me, because I wrote so much of it and I had so much interaction with my audience before Twitter imploded, before social media became so, so toxic, that I came to understand that the audience is so much more sophisticated than anyone teaching me writing in the 90s had conveyed to me, maybe because I wasn't so sophisticated yet. I think a lot about something I learned in my Jewish day school, which is that you're not allowed to learn. I hope that I'm saying this correctly.

You're not allowed to learn mysticism until you're 40 because you're not wise enough yet. And I think about that. Like, if you know somebody who's a writer and is 25, that person has so long to go before their contributions are considered enormously meaningful. And that person is very courageous because that person can see the field. That person knows it. That person is going to watch all of their peers become more successful as teachers, doctors, lawyers, hosts of radio shows, publicists, anything. But being a writer, it takes a while. Taffy Brodesser-Ackner, thank you so much for this conversation. Tanya, thank you.

Taffy Brodesser-Ackner is the author of the new novel Long Island Compromise. Terry has our next interview. I'll let her introduce it. When a 47-year-old man has a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl who is his art student, can you call the relationship consensual, even if she thinks she's madly in love with him? What if he leaves his wife and two children to marry the student? What if they stay married until his death at the age of 93? That former 17-year-old is my guest, Jill Cement. She's now an established novelist and memoirist, recipient of a National

Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a professor emeritus at the University of Florida in Gainesville. The questions I just asked are among the many questions she asks herself in her new memoir, Consent. It's in part a reflection and critique of her previous memoir, Half a Life, which was published in the mid-1990s when she was in her mid-40s. In Half a Life, she described herself as the aggressor, the one who initiated the first kiss and started the relationship. But in her new memoir, Consent, she confesses it was her future husband, Arnold Meshes, who started it. He looked down her blouse, said he wished she were older, and kissed her. Their relationship started in 1970.

She wonders, having seriously reflected on the Me Too movement, if that has rewritten the story of her marriage, and whether the story's ending can excuse its beginning. Jill Cement, welcome to Fresh Air. I really love this memoir, what you write about and how you write about it. What made you question how you told the story of the beginning of your relationship in the previous memoir, Half a Life? Well, I mean, when I finished Half a Life, I originally thought to myself,

this would be really interesting to revisit this material in years to come. I always thought that would be a really interesting way in which to do memoir, not to go on with the story, but to go on with your life and then reevaluate the story. But that remained an abstraction in my life because I didn't have a new way to look at that material. And then as the Me Too movement began to accelerate, it started to, you know, evoke all kinds of memories for me. I mean, one of the things is there's not a woman my age, I'm 71, who doesn't have one Me Too story or a hundred Me Too stories. And I started to realize that my Me Too story is my husband. And that changed the entire dynamic of how I view back. I mean, because when everyone else was telling their Me Too stories, they went on to have different mates. And my mate was initially one of those stories that are very risque and

certainly not acceptable today. So that was one of the things that prompted me to do it. So I want you to compare the first time you told the story in your memoir, Half a Life, and how you tell it now in Consent, because you compare the two stories in your new memoir. So let's start with how you told the story in the mid-90s in your memoir, Half a Life. Would you read an excerpt of that? And this is the story of how the relationship began. You're taking an art class with your future husband, Arnold. And at the last day of the semester, all the students have left, you've lingered, and you walk in back into the classroom.

I unbuttoned the top three buttons of my peasant blouse, crossed the ink-splattered floor, and kissed him. He kissed me back, then stopped himself. I had no precedent to go on except Valley of the Dolls and Peyton Place. I asked him if he would sleep with me. He looked stunned. I mustered all my nerve and asked again. Maybe we should talk, he said. I shook my head no. Sweetheart, I can't sleep with you. I'd like to, but I can't. I don't see why not, I said. I honestly didn't.

For one thing, I could be arrested, he smiled, trying to make light of things. I had no sense of humor. I won't tell anyone, I promised. He put his hand on my cheek. He didn't caress me. He simply pressed his hand against my skin. It wouldn't be fair to you. All right, so that's how you told it the first time around. And after considering the Me Too movement and sexual harassment and the language that we use today, you rethought the beginning

of the story and you told it in a way that you thought was more honest. So I'm going to ask you to read that version of the story that you write in your new memoir, Consent. Halfway through the semester, I caught him looking down my blouse, and that was more thrilling to me than the praise. I had been a late developer, and the breasts were new to me. No one wore a bra in those days, 1970. On the last night of class, I stayed after the others left to get his advice about my upcoming New York move. He knew artists in the city who might need an assistant. In his private studio, adjacent to the classroom,

he drew me to him him and I went willingly. I am purposely using the tired drew me to him because that was how my 17-year-old self, whose scant sexual knowledge came from Valley of the Dolls, might have described his action. And because to pull someone by physical touch makes him the aggressor. Me too? He was 47, married for 25 unfaithful years. He had two children, a daughter my age and a son two years older. His once ascending career as a social realist painter had stalled, and he now sold commercial serigraphs his younger self would have found appalling. He kissed me. I could have screamed. I could have slapped him, but what 17-year-old is prepared to slap a 47-year-old man she had fantasized about for the previous six months?

I fervently kissed him back. I had imagined his kiss ever since he looked down my blouse. But did I have the agency to consent? Okay, so we've heard two different versions of how you first started an intimate relationship with your then 30-year-old or the new art teacher. Why do you think in the first version of the story, when you told it in your previous memoir, that you made yourself the person who initiated that first kiss, who walked in to the classroom, unbuttoned the top three buttons of your blouse,

and approached him? Why did you tell it that way? You know, that's an excellent question. I've asked myself that numerous times. You know, I think in the most basic sense, I think that I wanted to empower myself. I didn't want to be telling a story that was about the older man going after the younger woman, that had been the trope of almost every novel and movie that came up from 1970 to 1990, whether it was Bertolucci or Philip Roth. that I had that kind of agency to be the sexual aggressor because I felt that was more of the truth to what I was telling. Is that really the truth? I don't know. But it felt at that time that I was doing something

that made how we got together a more honest way of telling because again I was it was something I really really wanted so it wasn't something that was being forced on me and at the same time I mean now looking back at it it's much more complex than that but the first time I think I told it that way not so much to protect Arnold or my marriage, but more to make me a young, willful woman who went after something and got it, not as someone who was a victim. Either way you look at that story, he was wrong. You know, if he initiated it, he was wrong. If you initiated it, he was wrong to go along with it. So when you think of it that way, how does it change your understanding of your late husband?

You know, it's a very complex thing. I mean, you have to understand that those first few days are just part of a 45-year marriage. So in proportion to the rest of the marriage, it's very different when you're living it. Do I think he did something wrong? Yeah. I mean, if I saw a man today, 47, going after a 17-year-old, I would intervene. However, it wasn't a time when people intervened. And I'm not in any way saying that what he did wasn't wrong. But there was no context for us to know that it was wrong. I mean, except the law. Well, I guess that's a good context. Because you were 17 in the age of consent in California, where you were was 18. So it was actually illegal. It was. I know exactly. Again, it was such a different time. But again, it doesn't dismiss what he did in any way, shape or form. Your husband died in 2016 at the age of 93. Could you have only written this memoir after his death? Do you think it would

have been very upsetting to him if you told the second version of the story while he was alive, or he is the aggressor? You know, I don't think it would have been upsetting to him in the sense that I think he was a deep feminist. And I think that he, had he lived through the whole Me Too movement, I think he might have reevaluated his position or his actions. I, you know, I try to imagine what he would think of this new memoir. I do it in the book. And it's, he was so devoted to art that if he thought this book was doing something good, he would have been willing to have been chastised for what he'd done. So I don't think he would have been. What he would have been upset about is me talking about him being, you know, a failed artist at a certain point in his life. I think that would have bothered him more than him being a sexual aggressor to me. You write about the language and how the language has changed

in describing the beginning of that relationship. So I'd like you to compare the words that would have been used to describe Arnold, your future husband, and the experience of you being 17 and him being 47 when the relationship started. So compare the language that you would have thought about it in in 1970, when you had that first kiss, to the language you thought about in the mid-90s, when you wrote your previous memoir, and the language that you think about now. Well, I mean, in 1970, he would have been a silver fox. And I would have been the coolest girl on the block because I kissed my art teacher.

In 1995, this is, remember, the 90s are sandwiched between Anita Hill, the Anita Hill hearing, and Clinton and the blue dress. And so I think in the middle, I would have thought of him more as you would have thought of Clinton as a Casanova, as someone who is a lech. You know, the words they used to describe Monica Lewinsky was bimbo and vixen. And they did the same thing to Anita Hill so that there was a language that implied that the woman was responsible just because she had a sexuality. And then if you go to today, you know, you would probably use the word sexual aggressor, maybe even predator. The part for me that bothers me is I can't imagine myself ever thinking of myself as victim. And it's hard to think of a predator if you don't think of yourself as a victim. And I don't think of myself as a survivor. I think this was a moment in my life that was wrong, and yet it was really liberating for me.

Was it wrong in the long run because the marriage lasted so long? Well, that's the question. I mean, it's not an answerable question. It's a rhetorical question. There's no way to know. I mean, would I do it differently today? Not for a second. So it's hard to know how to define those two things. We're listening to Terry's interview with writer Jill Cement. Her new memoir is called Consent. We'll hear more of their conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Let's get back to Terry's interview with Jill Cement. Her new memoir, Consent, begins when she

was 17 and fell in love and had a sexual relationship with her married art teacher. He was 47, 30 years older than her. And even though he epitomized her romantic archetype and she wanted the relationship, she now wonders if a 17-year-old is capable of consent and if in today's language he would be considered a predator. This memoir is in part a critique of the memoir she published in the mid-90s when she described herself as the person who initiated their first kiss. In her new book, Consent, she admits he initiated the kiss. They married and stayed together until his death at 93 in 2016, but she wonders if the story's ending can now excuse how it began.

Arnott was married with two children when you met. At what point did you find that out? Oh, I knew that right from the very beginning. Oh, right, because you met his wife at the gallery. I met his wife at his gallery, yeah. Right, right, right. So you knew he was married and knew he had two children. What did that mean to you, that he would be having an affair while he had a family?

You know, I came from such a broken family. My father, my actually, the whole family, my older brother, and me and my mother, threw my father out because he was so intolerable to live with. And so I, you know, I just didn't see marriage as what I see it now, which is this huge commitment of two people to go through the trials and tribulations of life. I just saw it as this thing that kind of ended in a mess. So it wasn't something that I... I just had no idea of the damage that I was doing to another family at 17. That's as simple as I could put it. Most 17-year-olds would find it gross to kiss a middle-aged man, let alone to

have sex with him. But for you, he say he was your romantic archetype. Why was your romantic archetype middle-aged? You know, I mean, it's so apparent to me now. It wasn't apparent to me when I wrote Half a Life, and it certainly wasn't apparent to me when I was 17. You know, I was craving to know what it was like to be loved by an older man. I mean, my father was, I mean, now I can say he was autistic because now we look at these behavioral things and be able to classify them. But in those days, he was just distant and insane. And so, and I watched other girls have the protection of the father. And I think I just wanted to go out and do that. And I don't think I just did it for myself. I think I did it for my

family to find a kind of stable man that would be within the family to help us because we were so lost. So I don't think it was, I mean, yes, it's Oedipal and it's Freudian, it's all those things, but I think it was also healing. And I think that's one of the reasons I did it. You gave him an ultimatum pretty early on in your relationship that he needed to leave his wife in two weeks or else. What or else did you have in mind? I'd have no idea what else. I mean, it was, I mean, God knows what else was, but it's only as a child

could do it. My mom at the time was also seeing a married man and so was her best friend. And I remember I would come home and I would say to both of those women who were having like, you know, the kind of trials and tribulations of dating married men. And I would say, I'm going to give them an ultimatum. And they would look at me stunned, okay, because they knew what marriage and having children and having a family life is like. But at 17, it's easy to give ultimatums. But he followed through on it.

He left his wife in two weeks. I think you were both kind of great mirrors for each other because when he looked at you, he saw himself as a great mentor, as a really great painter, and as sexy. And when you looked at him, you saw him seeing you as very attractive,

very sexual, very talented. He took you really seriously as a young painter, and he would give you really good critiques of your work, and you felt like you knew he was being honest because he gave you praise but also gave you criticism in the way that you do when you take somebody's work really seriously. Yeah, no, that was, it was really, I mean, it was fundamental for me having the confidence not just to become a painter, but to become a writer. I mean, that was

a huge leap for me. I was, I'm a high school dropout, I'm dyslexic, and so for me to have the courage to become a writer under those circumstances really sort of required, I mean, I guess you could have had it with parents who believe in you, but I needed a lover who believed in me in order to make that jump. Do you think he wanted a divorce before he met you, but didn't see the doorway out? I think that's probably true of almost everyone who has an affair. So yes, I do believe that. He had a mistress. He had to break up with both his mistress and his wife. And it was a mistress he had for seven years. So it wasn't a short-term thing. She was appropriate age mistress. She was also married. So I think that I was a catalyst for the end of a marriage,

not necessarily the cause of it. Right. But that leads to another question. I mean, the mistress that he had for seven years, there were other affairs before that while he was married, including with students. Did you wonder when you were 17, or maybe you didn't even know about this, would he have affairs? If he had an affair with you, who else would he have an affair with, even when you were in a relationship with him? You know, I never worried about it, which may be naive on my part, but I was 17. And, you know, there is a kind of power at 17 that you lose as you get older, which is that you, you know, it's the first inkling for a woman that she has power over men because she has sexuality.

It's a very powerful lesson for a young girl to understand, and I think that was like my Superman suit. You know, I thought he would never play around on me because I was young. When you were 17 and you were so serious about your relationship with your art teacher who became your husband, did you ever think about what it would mean when you were 30 and he was 60? Or when you were 40 and he was 70? Or when you were 60 and he would be 90? I would say at 17, I did not think about that because it's inconceivable at that age to imagine growing old. At 30, I probably

gave it some thought, but Arnold was a really vital man. So, you know, he was able to keep up with me. Now that I'm 71, okay, and I think to myself, you know, I get exhausted and I do all the things that, you know, 71-year-olds do. I start thinking, how did I not notice when I was 40 how tired he must have been? And I was oblivious to it. And one of the things that, you know, is so interesting about aging myself now is that I try to imagine how did he keep up with a 40-year-old? I mean, it's much more amazing to me now than it was when I was the 40-year-old. At a certain point, you realize this person is going to die way before you.

And that knowledge changes the way in which you view your future. And it's both good and bad, like everything else. I mean, in one way, you think to yourself, okay, I will start my life again in my 60s if he lives to be 90. And at the same time, you think to yourself, how can I start my life again at 60? So it gives a kind of, it makes the end of our relationship much more precious.

As anyone, if you have a sick partner, for example, a partner who has cancer, suddenly the years that they have cancer before they die become kind of precious to you because you know they're finite. And I think that was a huge lesson for me to learn. And I think that's why the marriage continued to have that kind of intensity because we knew it was going to come to an end. But you also had to be something of a caregiver. When you were writing your previous memoir and you were in your 40s and he was in his 70s,

while you were writing that book, he had had pneumonia twice, a cataract surgery that nearly blinded him. It did briefly blind him, but he got his sight back. He had a prostate infection that was only controlled but never cured, and a debilitating case of shingles and a neuralgia that resulted from it. So what was it like for you in your 40s to become a caregiver for somebody in their 70s? And I should mention here, once when you were out with him sitting on a bench, a homeless woman came up to you, looking at you and looking to your older husband and said to you, how much do you get paid to take care of him? Assuming that you were like a professional caregiver, not his wife.

You know, when I was writing Half a Life, you know, you just, people can really hide all kinds of really blatant things just by not wanting to see them. And I don't think I really understood that I was a caretaker until he hit his 80s. And then, you know, the 80s, and again, he was really vital. I mean, we traveled all over the world, he hiked, we did, you know, all sorts of activities. But the 80s was the first hint that I would have to curtail my own life in order to take care of him. And how did you feel about that? It can be very tender, but it can also lead to a certain amount of resentment because you're in your prime as a writer, and you didn't necessarily have the time you wanted for yourself, for your own life? You know, I didn't have children, so I got to have all those months and years that would have been caretaking for children. You know, I love the man, and caretaking for someone that you love,

I mean, did I get it? I mean, there was a kind of anger and frustration and exhaustion that went into caretaking. But I was also caretaking for my mother and my stepfather, so it was a real balancing act. And by the time those two people died and I just was caretaking for Arnold, it felt almost like a relief, quite frankly. When he died, who did you write down when you were asked for, say, at a doctor's office,

when you were asked for your emergency contact? It was, that was, I mean, so many things after he died. It was such a strange experience that I'm sure thousands and, you know, hundreds of thousands of people go through, which is, you know, I wrote down my brother, who I'm very close to, for an emergency contact. But I would say the hardest thing after losing him was grocery shopping. The idea that you would go into, I would go into grocery stores and just stand there because the idea of buying two pieces of chicken as opposed to one or not being able to bring home something that tastes good that you know your lover loves, it would just, that was where I would be immobilized.

It was the grocery store. When the relationship started with your art teacher, who became your husband, he was your mentor. I mean, he learned some things from you, but he was more of the mentor because he was the older man. He had more life experience. He was already an art teacher. He knew more about art than you did for no other reason than the virtue of his age.

But, you know, he lived. So at what point did the relationship start to change where you no longer needed him to be a mentor and you wanted to be equals? I would say probably 10 years into the relationship. So you would have been 27 and he would have been around 57. Right. I would say at that point, I mean, it started to change at CalArts. So I would even say in my early 20s, simply because he may have known more about art, but I knew more about the avant-garde. And so that was my sort of ace in a hole to become his equal. You know, I think as the relationship evolved, we traded roles as both mentor and student.

We were very involved in each other's work. I mean, I felt free to pick up a paintbrush and paint over on top of his painting to show him what I thought needed to be done. And he felt empowered to, you know, cross off or throw out chapters that he didn't think were working for me. I mean, obviously, we waited for the other person's permission. It was a very collaborative relationship. And so, you know, I think it balanced itself out for many, many years. And then the man painted until a week before he died. So it kept going. You were always 30 years younger than him.

Like, obviously that wasn't ever going to change during the marriage. And you say that it preserved your sense of being young because no matter how old you got, he was always older, and by comparison, you were always young. And you were afraid that when he died that you would suddenly be old. Can you talk a little bit more about that fear and how it actually turned out? Well, the fear, I mean, the fear probably was just of loneliness and ending up alone in old age. How it turned out, you know, I did grow old overnight. I mean, I'm able now in a way that when you're living with somebody who's so much older than you,

you are the person who always has more energy and you are the person who is always the one who looks better even when you look horrible. And suddenly without him, I am my age without any kind of context. Like my age was always in relationship to his age. And suddenly when he died, I found myself to be, you know, this age. And the most profound thing about growing old without him is understanding what he had been through that I couldn't even perceive. And that to me, I find quite fascinating. Can I ask you about cleaning out his closets, figuring out not only in relationship to his work, but in relationship to everything he owned,

what had lasting value that you wanted to keep and what you wanted to, like, put in the dumpster and have hauled away? You know, I was so, I mean, after he died, literally within a week, the only thing I kept of his was he had a T-shirt that had the menu of New York Noodle Town on it that they had given him because he ate there every day. And I kept that. I kept a couple of little things.

But, no, I was pretty merciless. I even, you know, I just wanted, I don't know, I just threw most of it away, most of it I gave to, of course, to goodwill and stuff. Well, Jill Cement, I'm really grateful to you for sharing so much of your life with us. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. This has been just delightful. Jill Cement's new memoir is called Consent.

She spoke with Terry Gross. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley. This message comes from NPR sponsor Grammarly. What if everyone at work were an expert communicator? Inbox numbers would drop, customer satisfaction scores would rise, and everyone would be more productive. That's what happens when you give Grammarly to your

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