{"product_id":"9780385488914","title":"Half a Life","description":"\u003cp\u003eUnflinchingly honest, moving, and funny, \u003ci\u003eHalf a Life\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCiment turned herself into a girl for whom a father is unnecessary-a tough girl who survived any way she could. She and her brother Jack helped support the family by working for a shady market researcher, quickly learning to supply their own answers to burning questions like, \"Did we like Swanson TV dinners? If so, why? On a scale of one to ten, how would we rate the new Talking Barbie? Arrow wax? Dr. Ross's dog food?\" She became a gang girl, a professional forger, and a Times Square porn model. Using a friend's SAT score she cheated her way into art school, and seduced and eventually married her art teacher, a married man thirty years her senior. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBy turns comic, tragic, and heartrending, \u003ci\u003eHalf a Life\u003c\/i\u003e is a bold, unsentimental portrait of the artist as a girl from nowhere, making herself up from scratch, acting up, and finally overcoming the consequences of being the child of a father incapable of love and responsibility.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47011067429104,"sku":"9780385488914","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780385488914_p0.jpg?v=1763694526","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780385488914","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}