Of Jill Ciment's Consent, Neil Gaiman and Alice Munro

Towards the end of her extraordinary memoir Consent, Jill Ciment writes about how her husband of 45 years, Arnold Mesches, responded to the news that he was dying of cancer. First, there was disbelief, then there were tears. And then: 

The next morning, he was back in his studio.

When he saw me standing in the doorway, staring at him, speechless, he said, ‘You should be taking notes for your book.’  

It’s a moment that shows Mesches trying his best to hold on to what has anchored him and his humanity — the art that he made, and the artist wife whom he supported. There’s something defiant about his decision to keep painting when he has just weeks to live, just as there is something gentle in his acceptance that as the husband of an author, he is also always a subject; and he has submitted to that fate without rancour.

As a novelist and a memoirist, Ciment has mined her life (and her husband) for stories and subjects. Of course Mesches knew this, but with that one sentence — “You should be taking notes for your book” — he sets himself apart from all the husbands who are embittered by envy at their more-successful wives. At this moment, as Mesches encourages Ciment to cast her writerly gaze on him, he becomes something of the ideal lover (to a writer at least). He’s also the man who was in his 40s when he met and made the moves on a teenaged Ciment. When Ciment recounted their love story in her memoir Half A Life — written in the mid-1990s, when Mesches was alive — she cast herself as a girl who acted on her desires and seduced a middle-aged man (who was married and 30 years older than her, had a daughter Ciment’s age, and was also having an affair with a friend’s wife). In Consent, written after Mesches’s death, Ciment tilts the rearview mirror and wonders whether her happy marriage with Mesches was fruit from a poisonous tree.    

Consent is an extraordinary work. It’s beautiful, both in terms of language — you can practically see every room Ciment describes — and also as a portrait of a long, complicated and fulfilling relationship. The courage that Ciment shows when she interrogates herself and her own writing is breathtaking, as is the generosity with which she accepts the darker, discomfiting aspects of her partner and their romance. In a radical act of rewriting and retelling, Ciment takes passages from her previous memoir and dismantles the text in Consent, puncturing Half A Life with details that she hadn’t included when she’d first written about her relationship with Mesches. None of the details do Mesches any favours. The older book, with its incompleteness and blinkered perspectives, is now very literally half a life.

What we get in Consent is still a love story, but one that turns the usual formula on its head. The ‘chase’ and the heady early days are usually romanticised, but in Ciment and Mesches’s story, these are the years that are uncomfortable and need to be recontextualised. Ciment does this without mercy but with grace. She also continues the story, archiving the couple’s happily-ever-after, which rarely gets written about in any detail because the post-chase life is generally considered boring if it’s without conflict. Ciment shows these to be the dynamic years when Ciment comes into her own while Mesches settles into his role as her partner. He had limited success as an artist, but evolved into a good husband. Mesches was the one who gave Ciment the confidence to become a writer. He’s the lover who believes in her, encouraging her to look past her limitations (imagine what it takes for a dyslexic high school dropout, whose dreams of being a visual artist crumbled into the reality of working as a nude model in a peep show, to believe she can be an author). Consent is a reminder that we all contain multitudes; that people change and that context is critically important for us to understand our experiences.

It’s not as though Ciment was actively and deliberately lying when she wrote Half A Life, but only after the #MeToo conversations did she get a different perspective on her experiences. They made her take a second and third look at her past, revealing both the predatory glint in Mesches’s behaviour and also Ciment’s own trauma and pain, which made her determined to not cast herself as a victim or a survivor. However, reality, experience and memory don’t often neatly arrange themselves in binaries or categories. In Ciment and Mesches’s case, love thrived in the spaces in between.   

Ciment admitting that she may have remembered (and recorded) her past incorrectly would always have stood out as brave, but reading Consent right after learning that Neil Gaiman had said the allegations of sexual misconduct against him are “false memories” was a potent reminder of how rare Ciment is as a person and as a public figure. For someone who has been so eloquent in his support of women’s rights to toss out a denial that could be taken out of a MRA (men’s ‘rights’ ‘activists’) handbook is not just disappointing, but also effectively lends more credence to the women’s claims. The allegations against Gaiman were the subject of The Master, a podcast by Tortoise Media, who have done some fantastic audio shows in the past (highly recommend Sweet Bobby and Who Trolled Amber?). To Tortoise Media’s credit, they give a platform to two women who allege they were sexually assaulted by Gaiman while also acknowledging that in both cases, the relationship was at least partially consensual. As the podcast repeatedly reminds the listener, it’s a complex issue and there are other women who have vouched for Gaiman. However, no amount of character certificates from friends changes the fact that Gaiman was way older than the women who have accused him of abuse and in both cases, he occupied a position of obvious power. He’s famous and charismatic; in one case, she’s babysitting for him — all this significantly muddles Gaiman’s defence that the relationships were unquestionably consensual. Add to this the non-disclosure agreements that his legal team had some women sign and how grudging police tend to be when it comes to pursuing such investigations. 

While believing the women who say they were sexually assaulted by Gaiman, it’s also worth pointing out that The Master doesn’t feel rigorous enough journalistically. To begin with, one of the hosts is Rachel Johnson, best known for being Boris Johnson’s sister (which she can’t help) and teetering between conservative and lazy in her journalism (which she can help). There are also editorial calls on Tortoise Media’s part that make the podcast seem dangerously close to a personal attack on Gaiman rather than an examination of the allegations against him. An entire episode is dedicated to Gaiman’s family’s links with Scientology even though his religious beliefs don’t seem to have any part to play in this scandal. There is almost no attention paid to the role played by Gaiman’s ex-wife Amanda Palmer, who was friends with one of the accusers and if not complicit in Gaiman’s predatory play, she certainly seems to be aware of his predilection. The podcast also veers towards kink shaming when it goes into details of the kind of sexual play Gaiman supposedly enjoys (really did not need any of that imagery in my head). For anyone who didn’t want to believe the allegations, there were enough journalistic gaps in The Master to give Gaiman the benefit of doubt — until Gaiman served us his “false memories” explanation.

Soon after the Gaiman story, Alice Munro’s daughter Andrea Skinner wrote a searing essay detailing how Munro sided with her husband Gerald Fremlin after learning Fremlin had sexually abused Skinner. One of the most chilling aspects of Skinner’s essay is that even as a child and later as a grown-up, Skinner did everything right. She talked to grown-ups, she went to the police, she followed all the due process you could expect her to, but Fremlin remained unrepentant (he characterised Skinner as a Lolita. She was 9 when first abused her) and Munro stayed by his side. That the woman whose writing was so insightful in its portraits of bullies, silenced women and quiet rebellions drew her strength from an abusive man is an uncomfortable truth to accept. If you’ve read Munro’s short stories, then the author’s decision to protect the man who abused her own daughter feels terribly upside-down, but also a reminder that things like consistency in characterisation and logical causality are the mechanics of fiction, not life. In real life, people are good to one person and evil to another; some are incandescent all the time, others light up in one space and fade into the wallpaper in another. Maybe that’s why we impose certain expectations, rules and demands upon storytelling. Life doesn’t make sense; at least fiction should. 

Skinner wrote that she chose to come out with her story because she wanted the fact that Munro was complicit in her own daughter’s abuse “to become part of the stories people tell about my mother.” She wrote, “I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t wrestle with the reality of what had happened to me, and with the fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with, and protect, my abuser.” Skinner is absolutely right to demand this  of future readers and writers. This is the context within which we should read Munro — and we should read her, contrary to the pronouncements of people like Mukul Kesavan who wrote an uncharacteristically shallow and short-sighted column about reconciling Skinner’s story with Munro’s writing despite not being familiar with her work. More frustrating than Kesavan having succumbed to hot-take culture — why else would he write a whole column about a writer whose work he doesn’t know and therefore doesn’t care for? — is the way so many online (all men) have applauded the column. If good writers are important for a literary culture to thrive, then equally important are attentive readers. To know that your readers aren’t really registering what you write anymore and instead just having a Pavlovian response to your byline has to be a chilling epiphany. It feels like yet another reminder that few people read and fewer still read carefully. Everyone wants ‘content’ that can work like white noise. Writing is the last bastion against that thoughtless, automaton-like consumption, provided we are thoughtful readers.  

(This seems like a good place to thank all of you who read this newsletter regularly or have read this particular edition till this point at least. We’re almost done. Kinda. Sorta. Ok not really. But there’s not too much more, godpromiss.)

“Readers who are parents might be forgiven for thinking that a writer who blamed her abused daughter for her husband’s paedophilia was a sociopath whose condition might have a bearing on her books,” Kesavan wrote in his column, after proudly announcing he hasn’t read Munro and doesn’t plan to now that he’s been enlightened by Skinner’s essay. (Curiously, Kesavan didn’t feel the need to make any such pronouncements about Gaiman or discuss any of the allegations against him.) Presumably, Kesavan intended to honour Skinner by rejecting her mother’s stories, but the declaration still feels like a knee-jerk reaction. It doesn’t feel like he had to “wrestle with the reality” the way Skinner hoped readers would. I’ve no idea if Munro was a sociopath — it seems a rather easy way of rejecting her in a way that effectively absolves her. Maybe even sympathises with her obliquely: “Poor dear of a sociopath, she didn’t know right from wrong” — but no one who has actually read Munro would consider her writing sociopathic. Munro as a writer was keenly aware of right and wrong. This is why her characters could use slyness like a superpower. This is why her failure as a woman and a mother is as comprehensively disappointing as it is.  

Sometimes, you can separate art from the artist. Sometimes, the art is the artist’s Siamese twin — distinctive and yet viscerally connected. Sometimes, you can see the monster in the art, but not the artist. Some artists are monsters and they've made great art, but that doesn’t mean being monstrous is fundamental to being creative. You could be a decent person and be creative. Sometimes, one's art is obviously related to one's life or personality or interests. Sometimes, it's entirely imaginary. Some art is valuable because of that autobiographical or historical angle. Some art is valuable because it is untethered to all reality. It's possible, maybe even essential, for there to be all these kinds of stories; for stories to resist any one unifying rule. It isn’t comfortable for us to be faced with the reality that Munro’s resistance was limited to her fiction and she couldn’t (or worse, didn’t want to) stand up to her husband. Just as it is deeply uncomfortable to realise that Gaiman, for all his insight and brilliance, is also a man who doesn’t understand consent and feels pleasure at feminine submission (maybe even inflicting pain). 

But no one said art was here to mollycoddle us into a satisfied stupor of self-indulgence. Or that artists are obliged to subscribe to any moral code, particularly in their personal lives. 

I am grateful that we finally know Skinner’s story. Now that she’s trusted readers with it, we’re tasked with the responsibility of holding that knowledge in one corner of our mind while reading and recommending Alice Munro. Read Munro and know that a woman who could be so weak-minded was also capable of spinning the cobweb-like stories of Lives of Girls and Women, for instance. The same holds for Gaiman. I won’t shy away from reading or recommending either of these authors’ writing, but from now on, if I suggest a Gaiman book, I will casually add that he was accused of sexual assault and responded with appalling chauvinism. This might dull the charisma of Shadow in American Gods or add an uncomfortable, dishonest edge to the smooth-tongued father in Fortunately Milk — and that’s ok. It’s better than ok, it’s good. 

Thank you for reading. Truly.  

Dear Reader will be back soon.