"Mr. X"

Unmailed Letters to a Married Woman "Mr. X"

Theme parks today build these monstrous roller-coasters and give them intimidating names like "Cyclone," "Hurricane" and "Colossus." They try and scare you and ask you to test your courage for their ride. Well, if they really wanted to scare you with the most terrifying and awesome experience in human life, they should name their ride "Love."

UNMAILED LETTERS is modern, blunt and powerful. The book is about a woman struggling to extricate herself from a drug abusing husband and the man who falls in love with her. It is not a book for everybody. Millions of us, men and women alike, have had what we believe to be great loves; ecstasy we've never known before only to sink into loss's despair. So, UNMAILED LETTERS is informally divided into three parts: pursuit, capture and loss/recovery.

Pursuit is fraught with both great expectation and frustration with those expectations unmet. Ups and downs, just like everybody else's relationship. Capture is best described by the line in the book, "I haven't written much poetry lately. I feel like I'm living it." One critic called the book's poetry "a portrait of the male psyche." It is the recovery portion that makes this book valuable.

Mona Golabek, host of NPR's The Romantic Hours said of the poem, Human Experience, read on her program the week of Sept. 23, 2002, "It was so moving, such a testament to the human condition, to love and loving, to desires and longing. I thought it was exquisite."

I say the book is not for everybody. New writers are pests! We seek validation for our work, first from friends, then acquaintances, then everybody we meet. "Read this. Read this. Tell me what you think." From some, the book triggered uncomfortable feelings from their own experience or the lives of their friends, and had to put it down. Others got as far as the pain in recovery - and recovery is painful whether a paper cut on your finger or deep emotional trauma - and put it down. Those who finished it found new hope. The book, and life for those who face it, has a happy ending.

Shall we step on the roller-coaster?