My Only Wife by Jac Jemc

My Only Wife Reviews

• 
  Swrp

  "I assume the you that was mine, will never be anyone else's."
  
  
  My Only Wife by
  Jac Jemc is well-written. Interesting, Heartbreaking and also touching!
  
  "She was MY ONLY WIFE and I accepted her for all that she was, all quirks, all inconsistencies and unexpected preferences."
  
  It's a love story, a 'true love' story. It is about a husband who loves and adores his wife - his only wife! There is a lot of depth and meaning, in his love for her.
  
  "I miss you. I`ve found bruises under my skin, now, weeks after you`ve gone missing, that stagnate and wait for you to heal them to a clean clarity of flesh. I am furious and I still love you."
  
  My Only Wife, I will always LOVE YOU!
• 
  Staci Miller

  I wish I had a physical copy of this book (I read it on Kindle) and lived in a high rise apartment in Chicago. I would neatly tear the pages out and send them soaring into the wind so others can find it. Words cannot express my love for this book, and I cannot find words for recommending it to people who might enjoy it. I tried to tell one friend, it came out wrong.
• 
  Samantha

  My Only Wife is a great novel to get lost in. I devoured it in one day, and the story captivated me the whole while. Jac Jemc is an accomplished author. Reading her writing is like falling into a dream. I didn't want to resurface.
  
  In My Only Wife, the nameless narrator recounts his time with his nameless wife. They were together for ten years before she wrecked their apartment and disappeared. Years later, the narrator is convinced he will never see her again; she's gone for good. But that doesn't stop him from obsessing over his wife and what she meant to him.
  
  This novel is rife with stories. For such a slim volume it contains so much. It's unusual in the best possible way. It's a great exploration of the slipperiness of memory, expectation, art, and relationships. The characters (especially the titular wife) are richly quirky and fascinatingly drawn. There's a lot of symbolism and deeper meaning. My Only Wife is a riveting, thought-provoking read. I definitely recommend it.
• 
  Samuel Snoek-Brown

  This slim novel simply swept me away. I had the good fortune to pick it up at a reading Jemc gave in Portland, in the last of the famed Smalldoggies Press series, but I actually bought it before Jemc read. I am a man utterly devoted to my wife, so the title alone caught my eye; I am also a man happily married to my wife, so the short write-up on the inside flap -- "Ten years ago the narrator unlocked the door of a wrecked apartment, empty of any trace of his wife. As stunning as her disappearance is his response. He freezes on the facts of her, haunting his recollections...." -- piqued my interest. When Jemc read that night (from chapter 32), the prose caught my breath and wouldn't release it until I'd started reading the book.
  
  The story is odd: there is almost no plot here, just a series of vignettes that build on each other in the minutest increments. The characters are difficult to like: the wife is fascinating and the husband's near-worship of her understandable, but she also is disturbingly selfish and he is sometimes infuriatingly blind to her power over him -- or, rather, willfully ignorant of it, because when he does have moments of insight, he lets them go quickly, desperately. But the prose in this book! Oh, the prose.... The way Jemc writes is simple, occasionally even simplistic, but it is nearly always perfect, nearly always the RIGHT words in the RIGHT rhythms. Her prose is lyrical: while some of the short chapters read almost like flash fiction, others are practically prose poems. Her imagery is precise, her little forays into monologued stories-within-the-story are exacting and breathtaking, her pace is spot-on, and her symbolism layered and wonderfully understated. Even the ending, which you will think you know but won't, is fantastic -- for such a simple concept of a novel, which she seems to give away in the flap text, she still manages to pull a surprise in the ending, and it's wonderful.
  
  I don't necessarily like the people in this book, but I understand these people and I LOVE this book. An absolute pleasure to read, and I will cherish it on my bookshelf. I don't often reread novels, but this is definitely one I'll return to again and again.
• 
  Lori

  From publisher
  
  Read 5/15/12 - 5/19/12
  4.5 Stars - Highly Recommended to everyone. Period.
  Pgs: 168
  Publisher: Dzanc Books
  
  Jac Jemc paints a devastating picture of what happens to the one who gets left behind in her debut novel My Only Wife .
  
  First, a confession: By sheer coincidence, I read Jac's novel on the heels of Amelia Gray's Threats, and while I promise this review will not be spent dissecting how similar the two novels are to one another, there seems no better way to start than by making some basic comparisons. For starters, they both wrote their novels from a male perspective. Both of their leading males are suffering the loss of their wives. Both perspectives are extremely constricted and unreliable, not to mention how eerily similar their writing styles are to one another - tight, teasing prose and extremely short chapters. Though Jac and Amelia have been published before, these are their debut novels and they were released within months of each other. I knew none of this when I picked them up. I'm tempted to use the phrase "bookendipity" for these "strange reading accidents".
  
  All similarities aside, My Only Wife is the magnifying glass under which an abandoned husband grieves and mourns the disappearance of his wife. Ten years have passed, and it appears our nameless narrator is still reliving the memories of their failed marriage in an effort to discover exactly where things had begun to disintegrate between them.
  
  It is obvious from the very beginning that this was not your normal, every-day sort of relationship, though the further down memory lane we go, the more fucked up and unusual it becomes. The wife, cold and withdrawn around her husband, apparently has this uncanny ability to get complete strangers to open up to her and spill their life stories, which she then repeats into a tape recorder behind the closed door of her closet. Preferring to carry the weight of strangers' secrets, she seemed to have little interest in those of her own husband, unless she was looking to start a fight. An overly particular and inflexible woman, the wife sometimes barked at our unnamed narrator over anything and everything, no matter how large or small. The engagement ring he bought from a mall jewelry store; watching her while she swam at the beach; her refusal to show him the inside her closet of other people's secrets or the painting she was working on in her art class; how she walked out of the movie theater if she got bored.
  
  And to hear our narrator tell it, he was the ever patient, ever loving other half. A man willing to accept his wife's eccentric ways, tip toeing around and keeping the peace. He worshipped her every breath. He soaked in every minute they spent together. He accepted her as she was. And he has collected these memories. And now he torments himself with them, because they are all he has left.
  
  Jac doesn't make you wait until the end of the novel to see the writing on the wall; it's been there in day-glo colors from the very start. But she does let our narrator help us connect the dots in his own slow and sensitive way. As he comes to terms with the fact that she is gone, we come to terms with the fact that we might not be getting the entire story.
  
  Reviewing these type of novels are always tricky for me. The simplicity of stories like these tend to make me feel as though I am missing something... That there must be something deeper, some additional meaning or message that the author has buried beneath her words that I just haven't uncovered yet. And then, when I see reviews like this one from html giant and this one from nouspique, I realize I am not the only one who feels it. And it makes me feel better. But then I laugh at how crazy we will drive ourselves in the search for these hidden messages.
  
  (for all hyperlinks, see my review here -
  http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.c...)
  
  If you read their review, Html Giant found a double "and" in the second to last paragraph of the book. They called it the perfect stutter and hoped beyond hope that it was intentional, rather than a serendipitous typo. They assigned the double "and" meaning. After reading their review, I admit that I flipped back through my copy of the book, fearing that I missed this obviously important hiccup, only to discover that, in the finished copy, the double "and" had been removed, and it was ... despite their discovery ... an accidental typo.
  
  So you see what I mean? We will go to incredible extremes searching for what isn't even there, when sometimes, the story we are reading is the whole story and nothing more. No hidden meaning, no deep and existential messages buried beneath the words. No smoke and mirrors. Just the words we are reading and the pages on which they are placed.
  
  And Jac can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd like to think that My Only Wife is simply as straight-forward as it appears. No tricks or sneaky agendas here. I think it's really just the story of a hurt and dejected husband pining for a woman who probably never really loved him the way he loved her, living in the past because for him, it's preferable to living in the present without her.
• 
  Ryan Werner

  A fifth of the way through the book, we finally find out what the inside flap already told us: this dude's wife left. Until then--and and after then for pretty much the entire rest of the book--we get vignettes of his wife being an obnoxious dickhead. She's difficult, selfish, and rude and this guy just loves her so damn much. Somewhat charming and a testament to not needing to understand other people's love, but I also feel bad for the guy.
  
  The wife doesn't quite fall into the manic pixie dream girl mold, despite knee jerk reactions, but she does exist through the husband's gaze and recollections. Which is tiresome and gets to be more and more tiresome as we move through the book, the nice detailed outline of a narrative that just isn't there.
  
  At a sentence level, this book is wonderful. Jemc has some terrific writing all throughout. If we're just talking just style, I'd recommend this book to anyone.
  
  It's an inventive form and constructed beautifully! For that, it's worth looking at. But the story is one that must be assembled from these frustrating, sometimes very pedestrian vignettes. By the time the book rejoins with the most interesting part of this makeshift narrative--the husband's actions after the wife's disappearance and not his endless, non-linear retracing of different things they did before she left--it's not enough to make up for the long stretches of the book that felt like a chore.
• 
  Kasa Cotugno

  This is the third book I've read in recent memory recounted by an unreliable narrator whose wife has fled the coop or been offed, but is nonetheless gone. I have tried but failed to remember if this construct has been employed utilizing an abandoned wife, but it seems the women are the ones who leave and are missed dearly. As with the others, the wedded life previous to the disappearance is idealized and the woman herself fetishized. This is a richer portrait of the unnamed wife, and the life described could not have been so idyllic as he remembers. Whether this is for his own protection or not is left to the reader to unravel. The book is slim, can easily be read in one sitting (as I did), but is rich in material. One of the wife's characteristics is her ability to make complete strangers open up to her fully sharing with her their innermost lives which she then records and keeps in a locked closet. Some of these stories are included as well as other stories that crop up, creating an imaginative patchwork of fantasy and memory. This is a haunting book, one that will resonate after its conclusion. Highly recommended.
  
• 
  Robert Wechsler

  This short novel starts out as a description of the narrator’s wife. It’s so wonderful and fresh that I wondered whether Jemc could sustain it for 160 pages. Just when I started thinking she couldn’t, the novel shifts to storytelling, first about how they met and courted, and then more freely into stories told by and about others. Until the last 20 pages or so, everything Jemc does works extremely well. I think the ending was unnecessary; an editor should have talked her out of it.
  
  But it does not in any way ruin the rest of it, which is one of the rare novels that I loved and yet could recommend to friends whose taste in reading is more conventional than mine. I'm happy to find that another Goodreads friend of mine is a fantastic writer. And another excellent work of fiction from Dzanc.
• 
  Seth

  I simply LOVED this book from beginning to end. There were times that I thought the characterizations were going to become too mannered for my taste but the author always managed to keep things grounded enough so that the characters remained real instead of fantastical. Or maybe I should say just fantastical enough. Anyway, whatever the tonality of this book was is just right for me. Can't wait to read more by this author.
  
• 
  Anna

  Jack Jemc's writing is so incredible. This is the third book by the author that I've read, and I am continually awed by the author's power over the written word. This was a brief but intense book about a marriage through they eyes of a husband struggling to understand his very strange wife. She seems to swing wildly between emotions and needs and boundaries, and all we know is that he quietly weathers the storm until one day she is simply gone. I think, ultimately, she (known to is readers as only "my wife") is something akin to a wild stallion, untamable, but still the husband tries to "keep" her. She cannot always explain her emotions or reasons for things, and becomes exasperated when her husband has a constant need to understand every aspect of her. Similar to the story of the woman with the ribbon tied round her throat, who asks only that her husband never ask her to remove it.
  
  Some exemplary quotes:
  p. 1 "My wife climbed stairs like a bull, but she descended them like a Duchamp painting, all blurred angles and motion."
  
  p. 7 "My wife was willowy. Not willowy in the way people commonly think of the word, but in a weeping willow sort of way. My wife was narrow. Her shoulders lacked breadth. There was a weight and direction to her slenderness. My wife's body was an arrow. There wasn't much to her, but what was there seemed to move towards the earth. The gravity of my wife could be overwhelming."
  
  p. 19 "She'd misunderstood. She thought my wife was saying he was an enigma.
  My wife hadn't intended to pay him such a compliment.
  My wife had lost to a man obsessed with fitting himself into his own picture frame.
  My wife said, "The only story I could tell that afternoon was ultimately about myself."
  "Tricky bastard." My wife laughed, defeated."
• 
  Brandon Will

  Jac Jemc dares to show the complexities of two people so much so that at times it's hard to not be really annoyed by them (judging by some of the reviews on here, this is a feeling people have when reading this novel sometimes, a feeling I, too, had).
  
  It's worth reading on if you find yourself so exasperated with one of the characters you'd kind of like to throw the book across the room.
  
  Jemc doesn't idealize people, even though her narrator, the husband, tends to do this for his wife at times. She sees people so clearly at times it's frustrating, yes, at times it hurts, at times it's profoundly beautiful and reminds us why connection with people is crucial and overwhelming and amazing and needed and always, always uncertain and somewhat mysterious.
  
  You might end up having a relationship with this novel not unlike a relationship of relationships' past -- like an ex who was intense and enriching yet fleeting and you ultimately knew was limited in it's time, this novel is alluring and quirky, companionable and illuminating, hard to decipher at times, uncompromising and off-putting some other times, and in the end completely worth the experience it had to offer for all of it's uniqueness and enrichment.
  
  Some of the prose is just absolutely beautiful, and you can never see exactly where this novel is going to take you.
  
  I'm eager to see what Jac does next.
• 
  Adam

  Jac be nimble, Jac be quick, Jac knifed this book in your head to stick.
  
  "I'm not a puzzle to be figured out, and I think if you figure something out, it's probably just for you, and probably has nothing to do with me."
  
  It's unnerving to me how familiarly this WOMAN depicts genuine husbandly devotion. There's nothing especially surreal about it, and perhaps it is the unexpected deftness with which a concrete array of intimate phenomena culminates in numinous nothingness, in the pulsing abyss of absence, that is so uncanny ("nobody's home"). Memory, far from being the key, tumbles and tumbles the lock on the impenetrable door: a really existing Woman. Harrowing in its gentleness, ghostly in its precision.
• 
  Laura

  This is going to leave me with a book hangover - so many unanswered questions!
  Did she always know she was going to leave?
  Did she love him the best she possibly could?
  Was it love, or just a transactional relationship? Are all marriages transactional relationships at their core?
  Is she redeemable?
  Does he really want her back? Or is he satisfied with having loved & lost, with having had a fairly successful relationship up until the end (and isn’t that the best we can hope for, really)?
  
  A pleasure to read, structured like a bag of potato chips (you’ll finish it all if you leave it open), powerful despite its brevity, I can’t recommend this book enough.
• 
  Jensen Beach

  This was a really great book. Compelling voice, intriguing plot. I loved every minute.
• 
  Tyler

  His wife has disappeared, leaving a chaotic mess of their apartment, and a thousand questions fleeting through the narrator's broken heart and mind. He soaks in his hindsight, and describes to us the enigmatic, frustrating, beautiful existence of his wife, and the uncontrollable nature of her leaving.

  Jac Jemc has given us a story with minimal movement, a barren landscape of context, and a claustrophobically small cast of characters. The anonymous narrator's recanting of his mysterious wife is ethereal, strange and emphatic in its insistence that the narrator grieves for the idea of his wife, rather than the reality of her.

  The narrator's timeline jumps around, highlighting key memories from the story of his marriage. As he files through his experiences, we feel his adoration, and ultimately, we feel his disappointment when their romance falters, and his rage when he is finally left alone. In the midst of his memories, the narrator also repeats stories told to him by his wife and strangers. These miniature stories are fables, totally complete and self-sufficient within the larger novel. It's these tiny stories that cement Jemc as one of my favorite modern writers. They are equally abstract, and keep a reader searching for the moral and relevance.

  Jemc's abstract writing is, in a word, captivating. Her prose is entirely poetic, and some part of me feels like it breaks the rules of what a novel is supposed to be.

  There was a time when I wrote a few pages of a small chapter of an imaginary novel, and when I showed it to a friend of mine for a quick review, o was told that it was too wandering, too musing, and that people don't necessarily want to read a string of stylistic word choices. Poetry is not a compelling story, basically. Jemc writes the way that this friend told me not too, and honestly, My Only Wife has reinvigorated the idea of experimental literature. Words and stories can be surrealistic and still be attractive to readers. There are no rules to art, but if there were, Jemc beautifully breaks them all.
• 
  pippi wrongstocking

  A lean, fierce, exhausting thing.
• 
  Trisha

  I must not be hipster enough to see what all the hype was about. I would warn you that there are spoilers ahead, but the truth is, there are absolutely no spoilers to spoil. There’s just....nothing. It’s 168 pages of a guy talking about his eccentric, obnoxious wife and how much he loves her, even though she doesn’t seem to care about him in any way. She’s rude, selfish, and - if we’re being honest - diagnosably crazy. When I read the book synopsis, I was expecting some sort of mystery or drama about her disappearance - the husband unlocks the door and finds the house in shambles and his wife vanished without a trace..... but in reality, it’s just him talking about their relationship the entire time, and the wife just up and left him. Though the writing was eloquent and descriptive, it didn’t make up for the fact that the plot line went nowhere. No drama, no twists, just a recap of his entire relationship and her weird behavior, and then she leaves. The end. I’m pretty bummed that I’m ending the year with such a disappointing book. It’s pretty obvious that I am not the target audience for this novel. I prefer novels that have an actual plot line, drama, twists and turns. I want to be entertained by the story, and I just didn’t find this novel entertaining or interesting at all. It just plodded along until it reaches its anticlimactic ending.
• 
  Strange Weather

  This novel made me uncomfortable enough to fidget, though it was a quick one by which to be caught up. The plot: a one-sided portrait of a romance written by a husband after his wife vanished. At times it was well written enough to feel too intimate, like stumbling into the relationship pivot of a stranger: the absurd human elements of a serious conversation, the elusive pain in misunderstandings, the bubbled-up flaws.
  
  A beautifully written vortex of emotional realism and the remembered/imagined past:
  
  "Today all I wanted was to get you drunk and to learn some deep secret I hated to know about you, so I could tell you mine and make an even trade. All I wanted was to discover that you'd been frightened to tell me something, that there was something you never wanted me to know, but of course you have nothing. You do give every bit of yourself to me and you expect the same of me, and I try, but I still want to grab some things and pack them into my cheeks for some famine when I know I'll be alone and need them."
• 
  Karin

  Short novel narrated by a man who's wife left him suddenly, as he reflects back on her and how little he actually knew her. The second half was stronger than the first, imo, and I preferred this author's short story collection A Different Bed Every Time. But still overall, pretty damn good.
• 
  Savannah Slone

  Blown away. One of the best examples of characterization I've ever witnessed.
• 
  RensReadingRainbow

  I both love and hate this book. I love that it’s thought-provoking. I love that it’s unforgiving in its portrayal of this broken marriage. I love that though you know he’s an unreliable narrator - a man telling only his side of a story colored by his wife’s abandonment - you still get to see why she would leave him. He reveals himself in the way he speaks about her, how he reacts to her. She is a wild and selfish person but he is a martyr with no backbone. They are terrible for each other from the start, both clearly settling for “good enough.”
  
  I did not love the writing style. If I never hear the phrase “my wife” again, it will still be too soon. But I mostly hate what this book made me feel. I did not like this wife or this husband. But l recognized all she ever really wants is to be free and live a life of her own stories - she collects other people’s stories because she can’t seem to make her own. Still, she feels a need for companionship and understanding, and here is this man - a shell of a person who at first wants nothing more than for her to fill his empty space. Later, all he wants is to possess her. As he tells his stories about his wife, he never gives her a name. You hear his obsession and his disdain for her, seldom his love and never his respect. He confuses his obsession with love.
  
  For me, his anger when she leaves isn’t so much that she’s gone or how she parts, but the fact that he never found it in himself to leave her first. This book is a testament to how people do not belong *to* each other, or even *with* each other. Possession has no place in a healthy relationship. Instead you should be making a choice, a choice to go on a journey together as two wholes and not two halves (a partnership, not an ownership).
  
  I’m going to be thinking about this book for a long while.
• 
  Jim

  Jac Jemc can write, there is no doubt about that. Wow. The emotional impact of this book was terrifying for me. Though I can understand many readers may not feel the same way at all, and may find the book is too bland, lacks a direction, or just meanders around in its narrative.
  This sentence from the book speaks volumes in its simplicity: My wife acted and reacted with meticulous consideration of herself. This fictional wife is probably someone many people know, and many of those many people probably also idolize/adore/worship this person for their unique approach to life, while the remainder of that many see the insidious, selfish nature this person cultivates and secretly, or not so, despise them and their damaging, centripetal force. Such people as this fictional Wife embodies, seem so surpassingly, unbelievably awesome that few would ever question anything they say or do. Such is their hold over those less unfettered by rules and norms that their entire life is held as an example of how incredible we all could be if we could only live, think, act, feel as they do. Idol worship, of a sort. Like those who follow celebrities and praise, unreservedly, their lifestyle knowing little or nothing about them besides what is dribbled out, or, more astoundingly, what can be imagined, created, and assumed based on a desire to be a tiny moon to their sun. Yes, one might say this is straying from the text, but this is how amazing this book constructs the person of the Wife in the tale. And for those with personal experience of such an individual as this Wife, the psychological devastation of the narrative is nearly overwhelming. This book will stay with me for a long time.
• 
  Richard Thomas

  THIS REVIEW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT THE NERVOUS BREAKDOWN.
  
  There is a sense of chaos involved in the act of falling in love, a lack of control, and quite possibly a hint of something tragic, a chance to be hurt. This applies to the slim but haunting novel My Only Wife (Dzanc Books) by Jac Jemc. In marriage there is the possibility of intimacy, a merging of spirit and life, but the reality can be a dense caryatid carved out of lies, mysteries, and selfish acts.
  
  My Only Wife is about an unnamed couple, a husband who has fallen and surrendered, and a deceptive, passionate and quirky wife. The way Jemc renders their story is painful in its depiction of beauty and love, vicious in its evocation of what a broken heart feels like—the eternal echo of a call left unanswered.
  
  
  I don’t usually point out epigraphs, but the two that open up this novel are so perfectly selected that I need to mention them up front. The first is from Emily Dickinson:
  
  “That those who know her, know her less
  The nearer her they get.”
  
  And the second is from Leonard Cohen:
  
  “Is this what you wanted? To live in a house that was haunted by the ghost of you and me?”
  
  The wife is an enigma, defying expectations—inclusive and dependent one minute, reclusive and absent the next—and the Cohen lines, especially, touch on the idea of a cruel mistress (or master) who would ask a lover to stay in a place where there is only the ghost of what used to be.
  
  The wife is a waitress, and though she keeps her thoughts and interpretations private, she has a unique ability to listen, to pull hidden narratives from her customers as if laying her hands on them to rid their souls of demons, and she shares their personal matters with her husband.
  
  In the beginning of the novel, this behavior is eccentric at worst, just her way of connecting to the world, of being intimate, of embracing one of her many gifts. Over time, it becomes a weapon, a means of separating the couple.
  
  The husband is in love with this woman, he adores her. His mantra, “My wife,” echoes through the novel. How many times over the course of the novel does he utter this phrase? I counted—almost five hundred:
  
  “My wife climbed staircases like a bull, but she descended them like a Duchamp.”
  
  And:
  
  “My wife walked out of theaters when she was bored, offended, tired, felt like moving.
  
  I sat through every movie I ever bought a ticket to, even if they were insufferable. I waited to see how a story turned out, if it redeemed itself.”
  
  And:
  
  “My wife was a constellation without a mythology to inform her shapes.”
  
  And so it goes. The husband worships the wife from afar, this distance she has put between them, allowing himself to be manipulated, grateful for what he has, always the optimist, happy to bask in her beauty, her uniqueness, her gifts.
  
  Paired with her allure and the stories she shares with her husband are random hints of her mania, her depression. It’s been said that genius borders on insanity. It doesn’t take much to set the wife off, always churning, always full of passion and angst that is quick to bubble to the surface, to boil over:
  
  “My wife was conceding, letting the drama go, when she moved a bottle of bleach from the kitchen table. Beneath the bottle, on her good red tablecloth, was a wet spot faded to pink. My wife pitched the bottle into the basket. My wife shouted, ‘Why can you never not ruin something?’
  
  ‘Excuse me?’
  
  ‘You ruin everything. You are never not ruining something.’”
  
  The reader is taken aback and, much like her husband, always searching for a logical reason for her outburst, for an apology, a way to make her happy. A simple mistake doesn’t warrant such vitriol. Relationships are give-and-take, we build our partners up—we don’t break them down. But with a deft hand Jemc weaves a pattern of contented life with that of misery and frustration. One day the couple is in love, holding hands and walking in the rain, and the next day they’re coming to the realization that they don’t know each other at all. It is a powerful potion that is brewed and simmered over time, building toward something, an end we know is coming, has been telegraphed already—but the mystery of how the darkness will descend still awaits us.
  
  Another example. Late in the novel, the wife finds a love letter that the husband wrote to her a long time ago. The expected response would be one of nostalgia, of romance and appreciation. But she erases the letter instead. Why? She erases the letter because she can. The impermanence of the letter has offended her—why write it in pencil so that it can be rubbed blurry, so that it can fade over time, why make a gesture that is so fleeting? Love is eternal. And like so many times throughout this tense and beautiful novel, we nod our heads in agreement with her, the romantic in us all seeing her point, while at the same time inhaling with shock at the brutality of the act, her deletion, and the crass way in which she confesses her sin.
  
  Towards the end of the book, after we bear witness to a powerful act of supernatural artistry (that, or simply her calculated and brutal cruelty) the husband writes his wife a letter, a love letter, even after all that has happened, in order to summon up his feelings and breathe again. Some of those thoughts, here, will shed a bit of light on his emotions:
  
  “I miss you. I’ve found bruises under my skin, now, weeks after you’ve gone missing, that stagnate and wait for you to heal them to a clean clarity of flesh… I am furious and I still love you.”
  
  To print any more of this letter would be unfair to future readers as it is one of the many deathblows that resonate throughout the final pages of this novel.
  
  In My Only Wife, Jac Jemc takes the noir and beauty and eternity of what we think is love and creates an entirely new narrative. As much as the husband in this story is the victim, powerless to resist or refuse, so are we. Captivated by the flawed goddess that is his wife, we are lured in by her siren song and dashed across the rocks. Maybe we will learn—or maybe we never had a chance.
• 
  Lisa

  If I were going strictly by enjoyment I'd have given it 2 stars because it wasn't much fun constantly wanting to punch the wife in her koan-spouting throat(some characters are fun2hate but not just get annoyed by). I also thought the husband was an irritating chump
  but I understood how his need to get away could keep disappearing like hunger pangs. Not the exact words but tho I'm not much of a highlighter I might've highlighted that sentence.
  I figured since it wasn't too long I might as well not DNF it. Then it started to get interesting enough to keep me wanting to see where it all was headed. I don't really know if I had an expectation of how it would end but somehow I wasn't surprised by how it did.
  I got that it was supposed to be surreally in a vacuum or else I would have had a real problem with that lady in the restaurant's scripted-sounding soliloquy. I guess the point was to show how the wife can dish out but can't take odd behavior?
  I dunno overall this novel gave me lots to ponder anyway and that's always worth something.
• 
  Helen

  *Shaking my head*
  I just don't know what to say. I was SO looking forward to reading My Only Wife after seeing so many positive reviews but ... it just didn't hit the mark for me. Really strange little book. The whole thing was somewhat annoying in my opinion. I guess the author was going for something artistic with the narrative - my wife this, my wife that...
  At first I was a little drawn in but after a short while it lost its appeal. Also, I found myself disliking the 2 main nameless characters more & more as the book went on & on. And then that ending! UGH!!
  I didn't find this thought provoking or memorable. Just annoying!
  This was my second read by this author. I liked The Grip of It a tad more than this but I wasn't blown away but that one either. Not sure if I will read anymore by Jac Jemc.
  Just not my cup of tea but it might be for the next person so I would never say not to give it a try...
  Oh, I gave it 2 STARS since it kept me interested enough to make it to the end. Guess I was holding out hope. *shrugs*
• 
  Travis Fortney

  My review from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, which you can find here:
  http://bit.ly/12I3bxc
  
  --
  
  
  This marks the first title I have read from indie publisher Dzanc Books, and the happy truth is that Jac Jemc's My Only Wife is an enjoyable, engaging, and well-written book. I read it in a single afternoon, and I firmly believe that if I am going to sit with a story that long, then then writer has done the part of her work that consists of writing good sentences very well.
  
  The book's premise is simple and straightforward. A man is left by his wife after ten years of marriage. She is a mysterious woman he has never fully understood. He revisits memories of her, trying to understand who she was.
  
  The story relies heavily on its mythical style. Phrases are repeated again and again. Very short chapters are made up of very short paragraphs, which are made up of short sentences. Neither the narrator, his wife, nor a single character in the entire book, are named.
  
  The book's style serves the plot, because the world of the book clearly isn't quite the real world. In the real world, upon the dissolution of a ten-year marriage, parents or friends would be called, the missing spouse would eventually be contacted, divorce papers would be served, the household would be divided, and closure would in this way be had. In short, in the real world, there would be no reason to "freeze on the details of her," because all of this would be sorted out before the door on the relationship closed for good. In a nutshell, that's the book's main weakness--it's very conceptual, but the concept is not strong or believable, which the author tries to cover up with intentionally vague and mysterious writing. This is never a good idea, and it's interesting to note that My Only Wife is edited by the author Matt Bell, whose debut novel In the house upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods suffers from the same problem in a much more irredeemable and pretentious way.
  
  As it is told in My Only Wife, the husband and wife exist in a kind of vacuum, sealed off from the rest of the world. Because their world is literally just the two of them, they come to define themselves against each other. This causes the wife to push back against the loss of her personal identity in favor of the marital "we," which causes the husband to respond to his wife's resistance with puzzlement and anger. Obviously this is well-traveled ground in literature, from Madame Bovary to Anna Karenina to Revolutionary Road, and on up to Serena, Gone Girl and a host of others, but Ms. Jemc's aforementioned minimalist, mythical and somewhat oblique style allows her to explore the material in what feels like a unique way.
  
  The style has its problems though. Foremost among these occurs as soon as you get past the concept and plot to the characters. We're told that the marriage at the center of the book has lasted ten years, and that's precisely when the willful suspension of disbelief required of the reader, the balance between real and unreal, becomes too much. The narrator's wife has a thousand and one quirky habits. She frays her clothes after buying them new! She locks herself in a closet and records stories on cassette tapes! She works as a waitress by choice! Strangers tell her intimate details about their lives! She paints! She likes old hats! She tears the pages out of books she likes and litters the streets with them, hoping they will provide comfort to a passerby! She's clumsy! She acts like a mafia Moll in bars! The list goes on and on and on. This might not have been too much had the duration of the marriage not been explicitly stated (or if the narrator's valid recollection of the marriage, i.e., his reliability, were somehow called into question), but as the story is written I did not believe that there was any way the marriage would have lasted ten years.
  
  Almost everyone has had a relationship (usually in high school or college) where one person is in love with every little thing about the other, puts him or her high up on a pedestal, doesn't really bother with the messy details, and is crushed and confused after the idealized (and unreal, since in these cases we mostly love our invention) partner gets bored and leaves--but I would bet that very few, if any, ten year marriages end this way. After ten years, it's impossible both that the narrator's wife would have remained such a mystery to him, and that he would have remained so devoted to her. He would either know the facts by the ten year mark, or would have decided them on his own. It's an absolute certainty that the narrator would have grown to hate nearly every single one of his wife's little quirks by that time. The quirks, after all, are an act of defiance against the marital "we," the wife's pushback against the definition the husband wants to impose on her. I would almost have found the story more believable if it had ended in a murder (which it seemed to be trending toward a few times in the middle of the book). If this is that one marriage in a million where the wife remains a mystery and an enigma for ten full years, where the husband keeps her high up on a pedestal and never truly interacts with her for that whole time and is crushed and confused when she leaves, then I needed to know a little bit more about what made the relationship so unique.
  
  Again though, I don't want to get too negative about this one, because it really was a quick and enjoyable read, and there is much to be impressed by here. Overall, My Only Wife left me nostalgic for a kind of simple, straightforward, well-written book that doesn't seem to exist very often anymore but ought to. Jac Jemc is an author to watch, and I've already purchased a few new titles from Dzanc Books and added them to my reading list.
  
  
• 
  Max

  I'd like to preface this by saying this is a "really good" 3 star, not an "it was okay" 3 star.
  
  I was hooked from the beginning and entranced throughout. There's some dreamlike quality to Jemc's writing. She can keep you engaged fully just by the writing alone. It's lyrical, almost.
  
  The characters in here are complicated and messy. They're interesting and fully realized. I think I hated them both. But that's what's so interesting about them: I actually felt something towards them, as if they were real, as if I was reading someone's actual memoir.
  
  Even though I expected this to be some kind of light mystery, it never really is. There isn't really any singular plot, even. There's no action or twists or reveals or anything like that. It's just a quiet book about a man talking about his wife.
  
  Not something I would usually read, but I enjoy Jemc so much that I gave this one a try, and I'm happy about it.