By Jessica Dorfman Jones
Crown Trade, $25.00, 336 pages
Klonopin Lunch is the true story of Jessica Dorfman Jones’s journey to discover herself via “Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll”. A friend’s suggestion that they take guitar lessons is the ticket-to-ride for this rollercoaster of a memoir and the beginning of Jones’s descent into an alternate lifestyle despite being thirty, married and employed. However, she does not make this move lightly. While she decides she wants to sleep with her guitar teacher on page 13 she doesn’t actually do so until page 155. What lies in between is great material for a therapist’s office but potentially exhausting for a reader.
Jones’s chronicling of her split life with her rocker boyfriend and quiet, seemingly unaware husband covers the full spectrum of emotion. She has the self-awareness to know that even as she ponders what she is doing to everyone around her “once again, in the midst of thinking about someone else, it all came back down to me”. This kind of self-indulgent behavior could render her unlikable but doesn’t, thanks to her ability to write clearly about muddy issues and her wicked sense of humor. Both will keep Klonopin Lunch readers engaged. So much so that this reviewer is looking forward to what she does next.
Reviewed by Catherine Gilmore
[amazon asin=0307886972&text=Buy On Amazon&template=carousel]