Klonopin Lunch

May 28, 2012
Named for the wonder pill that calmed her down in the midst of a hysterical heartbreak, this thin, instant memoir reconstructs New Yorker Jones’s (The Art of Cheating) sadly destructive, ultimately self-revelatory affair with her sexy young guitar teacher. Married for four years to Andrew, a man of either saintly indulgence or monumental blindness, Jones has grown weary by age 30-something of her ho-hum home life and unchallenging, finite work in an startup New York City dot-com and accepts a friend’s challenge to take guitar lessons. Gideon, the sexy clerk from the Chelsea guitar store, arrives at her home in tight pants, a “70s dude flip,” and with a crooked smile, and Jones is a goner. What ensues is the sordid unraveling of her affair and marriage: she begins to frequent Gideon’s gigs (she’s only a little shocked at how mediocre his band is), stays out late, does drugs with him and his band, loses weight, and starts her own band, Throws like a Girl. Sliding into self-loathing and incoherence from drugs and her slavish passion, she also has to scramble for a new job once her dot-com closes. The affair knocks her out of her complacency, yet even though Gideon proves “a little more one-dimensional” than she originally thought, a coke head and womanizer to boot, she learns finally the toll of dishonesty in this very raw, human lesson about vulnerability and growth.

June 15, 2012
A funny, sexy memoir of a good girl gone momentarily very bad. The title suggests yet another tale of addiction and redemption. Not quite. Jones (The Art of Cheating: A Nasty Little Book for Tricky Little Schemers and Their Hapless Victims, 2007) was an unhappily married executive at a Manhattan dot-com in the late 1990s, just past 30 and worrying about losing her edge too soon when she began taking guitar lessons from a "Jewish Vinnie Barbarino" for whom she felt an instant sexual attraction. Thus followed a couple of years in which she fell in deeper with her Virgil of badness and increasingly estranged from her oddly passive and incurious college-sweetheart husband. She began nightclubbing, putting together a band, taking cocaine and other drugs, and enjoying lots of the best sex of her life. This is not an especially profound book--the deepest thing in it is the epigraph from the Gnostic Bibles--and Jones skirts romantic-comedy cliche territory. She even has a gay male confidant who inspired the book's title and delivers its biggest laugh-out-loud line (which may be worth the price of the book). However, Jones is a talented writer. The chapter explaining the book's title is a masterpiece of comic writing, and Jones writes freshly and perceptively about love, lust and sex. Despite ample evidence of her real-life ability to lie, in her book, at least, she is starkly (and wittily) honest about her own faults while being generous toward the deeply flawed men in her life. Some readers will find Jones' sins unappealing, but many will be eager to see what other books come out of her--a guilty pleasure.

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