Ander Monson on Jay Ponteri’s memoir, Wedlocked, which he chose as the winner of the Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction
An essay is an artificial intelligence, a continual reenactment of a particular strand of thinking. Whenever the reader encounters one, it runs like software in her head as she reads, producing an experience of actually inhabiting another’s brain. Jay Ponteri’s Wedlocked is a powerful example, frankly painful in the intensity of its apparent honesty and capacity for neurotic exploration and self-laceration. Yet even deep in its own fever suddenly it shifts its lens to the Crusades. The perspective shift keeps the interiority from becoming solipsistic trick: instead Ponteri takes the self, in all its ugliness and capacity for delusion, as an experimental subject and puts it through the paces. Through application of intense pressure, this book becomes not just about Ponteri and all his quirks, but about marriage and intimacy, about America, about lived human experience. The intensity of this Jay Ponteri simulation is such that it’s harrowing enough to just be on the inside for a little while. In this dissociated, disconnected, fragmented world, this is I think what we want of writing: to let us feel, to let us live vicariously, to remind us that we are alive.—Ander Monson, Oregon Book Award Judge for Creative Nonfiction and author of Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir