Married writer Jay Ponteri finds himself infatuated with a woman other than his wife and writes a manuscript to explore his feelings. Discovery of this manuscript understandably strains his marriage. Wedlocked offers readers an intimate, idiosyncratic view of a human institution that can so often fail, leaving its inhabitants lonely and adrift. The narrator struggles with living deep inside his thoughts and dreams while yearning to be known and loved by either woman in his life. For many marrieds, attraction to people other than their spouses has long been a classic refrain, and even President Jimmy Carter famously admitted to Playboy, “I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times...The guy who's loyal to his wife ought not to be condescending or proud because of the relative degree of sinfulness." Ponteri lays bare his inner life and in doing so provides all of us in monogamous relationships rich material to consider.

Wedlocked: A Memoir

Self-Help

Ponteri, Jay

Relationships

Hawthorne Books

Written over the course of eight years, Someone Told Me combines associative self-portraiture, lyric essay, literary criticism, and memory-based work. The experimental prose toggles between descriptions of daily domestic life, responses to art----e.g., Richard Linklater's Boyhood and Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things To Me---and dreams of artists and the art they make, e.g., Robert Walser, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Anne Frank. Core themes include race, gender, heteronormativity, loneliness, shame, gentrification, attachment, parenthood, grief, and traumatic birth.

Someone Told Me

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Widow and Orphan House

Literary Nonfiction. DARKMOUTH STRIKES AGAIN is a lyric essay about metaphors, the self, family, death, language, and art. It speaks to the unspoken, speaks what we think but are too afraid to say aloud. DARKMOUTH attempts to understand sadness while poking breathing holes in it too. If sadness moves inside of us in dark fluent waves, DARKMOUTH attempts (&amp; fails beautifully) to ride them, to rise above them, to keep from sinking beneath. It feels and sings like an epic poem.

Darkmouth Strikes Again

History & Criticism

Future Tense Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ponteri, Jay. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ponteri, Jay