Darryl – Jackie Ess

[Divided Publishing; 2025]

Maybe you too have dated a white man in his 40s who’s chronically unsure: about his desires, about his failures, about the diminishing returns of his potency, potential and place in the world. It’s clear there’s a protracted ego crisis going on, and even if you aren’t dabbling in the dating world, that it’s everybody’s problem now (look no further than the list of megalomaniacal oligarchs deconstructing our government). 

But let’s meet writer Jackie Ess closer to home: in Darryl and Mindy’s bedroom, where they’re trying to make a go of the cuckolding lifestyle. Because far from lampooning the men at this ego crisis’s center, as is customary online, Ess’s novel Darryl takes us into the mind of a self-described “cuckold” with nuance, humor, and most importantly, empathy. 

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“He doesn’t just get to have a big hard cock, he gets to be a real person with real feelings, and real reasons for them,” says Darryl about his wife Mindy’s boyfriend. “Thinking about that put me right back on my spiral of shame. Am I jealous of Bill’s loss? I guess I’m jealous of anybody who cries at the right times.”

It’s hard to write about this novel—because it’s like nothing I’ve ever read—but it’s also extremely worthwhile—because it’s like nothing I’ve ever read. We have a textbook unreliable narrator, which makes it difficult to locate yourself as the reader, but after you’re done marveling at Ess’s emotional/rhetorical manipulations, the above quote is as good a place as any to start. We’re all searching (in vain) for a bullet-proof way to relate ethically to our identity, to the root and expression of our desires, but no one is searching more vainly and fruitlessly than cis men. Darryl tries to make a comfortable home for himself on the outskirts of heterosexual expression, to rationalize and categorize his desire, but he’s slightly too self-aware to do so: after all, is cuckold a political identity? Are cuckolds a maligned out-group? 

Although the identity concerns remain (intentionally) cloudy, Darryl knows from the first sentence what he wants: “You live vicariously through celebrities, I live vicariously through the guys who fuck my wife,” he tells us. He then launches into a fantasy populated with cinematic specificity:

I think a lot about LeBron James. I can imagine his NBA rings on the bedside table, next to Mindy’s wedding ring and these little antique porcelain ashtrays that Mindy’s mom gave us for our wedding. I’ll bet he’s got a great grip, and big hands that move decisively. A touch with no tickle, no trepidation, no contingency plan, just going exactly to the right place and going straight there.

How tantalizing to watch someone perform in ways he can’t? But actually, come to think of it, isn’t that just the premise of professional sports? Ess is clever that way—through Darryl’s unceasing inner monologue, she subverts any readerly expectation you might have, especially regarding in-group and out-group sexual behavior.

Unfortunately for Darryl, he’s too wound up in the ethics of his abasement to simply enjoy the fantasy or dynamic he’s set up. He has to constantly remain questioning, interrogating, and checking-in with both Mindy and himself: “But look, I know as well as you do that [the LeBron thing] is just a fantasy. And even in fantasy I try to mostly keep this stuff confined to people confirmed to be in the lifestyle, which I’m pretty sure he isn’t. Cause it’s a little objectifying, you know? I try to do right by people.” 

What’s normal, and what’s out of line? As he navigates this brave new world, what are the feelings that Darryl gets to have?

Is this relentless positioning and self-questioning a bug of polyamory…or a feature?

Have I lived in Brooklyn for too long?

At several points, Darryl opines that it would be easier to just be gay, or trans, or some other more easily legible identity. But he isn’t: he’s a married man in his 40s just beginning to reckon honestly with his desires. And vanilla sex is boring to him, not to mention dishonest. “I think of face to face sex as a kind of like sixty-nine, a compromise for no one in particular,” he muses. “Who has time for that much feminism?”

Who has time, and who has inclination? Not Darryl, and notably, not his wife Mindy. Mindy likes getting railed by Bill while Darryl watches; she likes getting slapped around by Clive while Darryl watches. Her boyfriend Clive, who begins as an ethnically and ethically ambiguous character, lets his fascist flag fly by the end, while Bill remains his sweetheart counter. Both are a kind of talisman for Darryl—he envies them, aspires to be them, and hates them in equal measure, cycling between these emotional states at breakneck speed.

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Darryl was initially published by CLASH in 2021, and is now being re-released by London- and Brussels-based press Divided Publishing. Reading it in 2025 is a strange experience that I’ve struggled to put my finger on, but I think it comes down to the relentless binarism of the moment. It feels like gender and sex are the last holdout, the last ambit of play where things haven’t been fully decided and categorized, where you don’t have to declare an immutable allegiance to one identity or the other, because things aren’t as cut and dry as they seem (and perhaps that’s why the issue has become such a political target.) Ess takes on the challenge and promise of this murkiness without, for a single moment, copping out by oversimplifying, winking at the reader, or playing Darryl’s escapades purely for laughs—while also managing to write a dryly hilarious book (“Maybe there are cucks who aren’t even men,” Darryl ponders. “Is that postmodernism?”).

“Everybody else is about performance, pleasure, recognition … [w]e cuckolds are the only sexual orientation that’s about the truth.” Only when Mindy is berating him, and Clive is balls deep in Mindy while also berating him, and Darryl is being made to stand in the corner and watch, is Darryl free from the relentless onslaught of choices, of the need to perform, of the constant rationalizing and self-mythologizing. Only then is he privy to  “the punishing reminder that being a cuck isn’t a matter of an enlightened lifestyle at all, it was never a choice, never a kink, it was just a fact. It’s a fact about nature and it’s confirmed in the heart.” It’s punishment, and that punishment is relief.

Eva Dunsky is a writer, teacher, and translator. She has been named a semifinalist for the American Short(er) Fiction Contest and the Driftwood Story Prize, was nominated for the PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and has received grants from Institut Ramon Llull and Columbia University to fund her translations. She teaches first-year writing and literature courses at School of Visual Arts and Baruch College, and is at work on her first novel. Read more of her writing at https://evaduns.ky/.