Wedlocked: A Memoir
There are many books being published today that are hailed as “daring” or “brave,” but for me, there is only one book that is daring and brave: this book is Jay Ponteri’s Wedlocked. Ponteri does not flinch; he does not cower; he offers rawness and honesty, the storm, and the eye of the storm. His long hard stare at marriage and longing, at the inner life of ideas and dreams alongside the life of platitudes and home repairs, gives us a rare and undaunting meditation on and interrogation into these lives. We want him to stay; we want him to go. We want him to have the dream and destroy it too. Essayistic, narrative, and meditative by turns, Ponteri’s is a beautiful and truly courageous voice.—Jenny Boully, Author of The Book of Beginnings and EndingsThe great polish poet Czeslaw Milosz talked about the importance of a writer to engage with his or her shadow. That is, often a writer puts forth a kind of hero sense of the self, a sort of announcement to the world that the person you are sensing beneath the writing is essentially a nice, good, person. Milosz’s point was that human beings are more complicated than simply being nice or good and that the shadow part of us holds a rich store of truth, meaning, and in the end understanding. So it is in Jay Ponteri’s memoir, Wedlocked, that we find a writer engaged with his shadow, wrestling with it, losing and winning with it. This is a book that moves beyond simple individual honesty to the greater more complex honesty of human nature. It’s a beautiful, sticky, bloody, sweaty, feverish book that will be hard for some people to read. Those who do, though, will find that what they have imagined is true: our romantic relationships, or relationships with the lover, with the self, with the other, are as complicated and messy and ecstatic as the human body engaged in them.—Matthew Dickman, Author of All-American PoemIn our understanding of gender, relationship, and desire – there is always another frontier of ignorance before us. In Wedlocked, Jay Ponteri goes into the country of marriage and masculinity in a way that is freshly honest, insightful, and tragic. Ponteri’s fierce scrutiny of the degrees of separation inside union has not been performed before in this contemporary register. Bravely, he shines light on regions of the male psyche that mostly have been left in shadow. Wedlocked is a fascinating book that will interest all men and women who struggle in that sticky, lonely terrain between bonding and bondage.—Tony Hoagland, Author of What Narcissism Means to Me, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle AwardPonteri’s story offers the contemporary reader a fresh way to contemplate our country’s abiding love/hate relationship with the institution of marriage. We revere it; we chafe against it. We sin in our hearts, and our guilt depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. This is a new and nuanced contribution to an enduring debate. I welcome it.—Antonya Nelson, Author of BoundJay Ponteri is a brave seeker with a capacious and conflicted heart. Equal parts confession, fantasy, meditation and rant, his deeply private memoir is fearless in its exploration of dark and uncomfortable corners in his marriage. These beautifully crafted pages shine a light on loneliness, marriage, fatherhood and how we sustain ourselves in our lives of perfect ordinariness.—Natalie Serber, Author of Shout Her Lovely NameMany recent books have been written, of course, about sex, marriage, love, men, and women. Very few if any risk the level of intimacy, candor, and rawness that Jay Ponteri’s book does. Very few if any behold the husband (in all his agony) with the depth that this book does. Very few if any expose the male psyche with this book’s nerve. None that I can think of is smarter about the uses of fantasy. I hugely admire Wedlocked.—David Shields, Author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto