MY SOUL ON ICE

In this memoir, Jones writes of her husband, his other wife, and a different kind of friendship.

In 2018,the author found out that for a decade of her five-decade-long marriage, her spouse had been living with another woman; soon, they commemorated their newly configured lifestyle with jewelry: “My plan was to offer Jim friendship and access to the family, if he accepted my metaphor. This new status would be cemented by an exchange of rings. My own compromise was to accept my role in this plural marriage.” In this remembrance, the author—a retired educator, wife, and mother of two adult sons—examines her life in the wake of this turn of events. Jones delves into her youth and young adulthood; she was raised in the U.K. from the age of 5 after her British fighter pilot father returned from India after World War II. She identifies her father’s inclinations toward social hierarchies and his disapproval of her first boyfriend as sources of her later difficulties, and she notes how both she and her mother were in marriages that left them mostly alone and lonely. Jones makes poignant observations about gender roles as she relates the difficult task of grappling with her chaotic emotional state. Along the way, she intimates that doing what was expected of her as a woman made her complacent; at one point, she cites the main character in Sigrid Undset’s novel Kristin Lavransdatter (1929), who “tempts away a married man and later marries him herself” and then dies tragically; she’s “an ‘Eve’ character, blamed for everything that happened to her,” she writes. She vividly tells of internalizing this notion and of questioning whether she was to blame for her own situation: “Was I not sexy enough, not pretty enough, or just not sweet enough? Had I not made a ‘nice home’ for Jim, as his mother had requested at our wedding?” Jones also manages to create a cliffhanger by drawing out the initial “ambush” of her husband, in which she confronted him about his secret. The resulting confrontation fizzles without any drama, but some readers are likely to be intrigued by the unique decision she made in its aftermath.

An often engaging account of a woman finding a way forward after a marital crisis.