I couldn't put Wedlocked: A Memoir by Jay Ponteri down. It was one of those books that I heard about, bought and read within 24 hours' time. I put the whole world on hold while I devoured this text. I cried. I Oh my GOD-ed overr his intensely personal and superbly crafted memoir detailing the inner life of an unhappily married man.

What I loved about Ponteri's memoir is that he is brutally honest about his own shortcomings as a husband. It's as if he's done the hard, necessary of coming to terms with one's contribution to a failed relationship. Jay Ponteri was an asshole to ex-wife, but his truth-telling about this fact makes me love him. Jay doesn't sugarcoat any aspect of his marriage's demise, not the dysfunction in the bedroom, the way he disregarded his wife's needs, not even his erotic inner fantasy life with fictitious woman, Annie. Well, Annie was not entirely fictitious. It turns out that Annie was a composite of the many women, other than Ponteri's wife to whom he felt attracted while married. Not surprisingly, when Ponteri's wife found the manuscript, she felt betrayed and that betrayal led to the eventual end of their union.

In addition to being honest, Jay Ponteri wrote so beautifully, with such poignant images, that the lines between prose and poetry often blurred. If at times the work shifted into a dreamlike stream of consciousness like state, those passages served to shore up the confusion and transition that the author was sorting through. Jay Ponteri wrote much of this manuscript in real time as his marriage dissovled. The work is a sometimes uncomfortable but always aesthetically satisfying. I know the subject matter is dark, but Ponteri delivered as only gifted, devoted writer can.

Lines like this, "Loneliness is pining for what you don't have and shutting out what you do" still haunt me. It's as if Ponteri wanted his reflection to be some sort of a combination self-help book/cautionary tale. I will return to this book again, not just because of the subject matter but because of the art of the book, which in my opinion is of literary quality. ( )