Jim and Pam, Janine and Gregory, Carmee and Sydney, Meredith and McDreany.
You know how it goes.
Two television characters, obvious chemistry, and you know deep down that there's only one will they or won't they get together?
We're breaking down these relationships and why we love them and hate them.
Listen now to the pop culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR.
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 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.
Its 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 forties.
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 Meshies, 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 hash metoo movement, if that has rewritten the story of her marriage and whether the story's ending can excuse its beginning.