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This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross.

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 in two children? 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 asked 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-90s

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.

...