HOBART

We kinda loved us some My Only Wife by Jac Jemc round here

My Only Wife opens with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson: “That those who know her, know her less, the nearer her they get.” This is the reader’s obsession and compulsion and joy, shared by the husband, who has been left, who recounts for us the stories of his wife. This novel is so well-written, so well-crafted, I was constantly torn between slowing down to linger in the wonderful prose and speeding up to chase the intoxicating story, which is to say, the intoxicating wife. A woman who rips pages from her favorite books, tosses the pages out of windows for passersby below to find and read. A woman who erases the first love letter her husband ever wrote her because it was written in pencil (and for a more heartbreaking reason I won’t divulge here). A woman who collects oral histories of strangers, records them secluded in a closet, out of earshot of her husband. A woman you’d expect to find in a foreign film, where women are celebrated for their strength and wit and independent spirit and unknowability. And while we are making comparisons to the movies, there is a Hitchockian ending I didn’t see coming (as one shouldn’t, Hitchcockian endings!). All in all, a brilliant novel I will add to my shelf of favorite books, alongside Memories of My Melancholy Whores and The Lover and I Look Divine and The Postman Always Rings Twice and Suicide and A Single Man. Books to read again and again. Books to obsess over and devour.

—Elizabeth Ellen