Bonnie Ashley still keeps her favorite wedding gown in her bedroom but says she never plans to marry again -- at least, not without really getting to know the guy first.
There is a little girl in Bonnie Ashley that peeks out every once in a while.
"Look how handsome my daddy was!" she says near the door of her home after two hours of describing some of the details of her 32-year stretch of 11 marriages and 11 divorces.
None lasted more than two years, and her last one, less than two years ago, clocked in at 45 days. Appropriately, it was in Las Vegas.
She left one cheating husband -- the third or fourth -- alone in a motel room with no clothes.
But looking at her father's picture, small and black and white, Ashley, 53, seems giddy, in love with life, even coy.
She has written a self-published memoir "Ex-Husband in the Freezer" (Outskirts Press, $16.95), chronicling her first eight marriages and divorces. She's working on a sequel that will examine her last three marriages and divorces -- all to and from the same man -- as well as the consequences of a torrid affair.
The first book is clear about how her father, a minister, and that same daddy looking sleek and debonair in the picture, set her up for disappointment.
"He was oblivious to my feelings and had no sympathy for my state of grief," she writes at one point about him and her attempt to hug him at her mother's funeral. "The preacher who who had so much sympathy for complete strangers who lost loved ones had none for his own daughter."
Less than a minute after showing off his picture, as she stands on her porch, the little girl goes away and the Salisbury, Md.-native's eyes well with tears.
"When I read that book I wrote, I just want to take that little girl in my arms and tell her everything will be all right," she says. "Then, I realize that little girl is me."
Ashley has been attempting to outgrow that little girl for more than five decades.
Like her story, however, it's a work in progress: It's only been two weeks since she kicked a man out of her house.
Then again, she didn't marry this one.
"I've learned some things," she says.
Kind of.
You can look at it comically, says Ashley's best friend for 25 years, Pat Paladino of Magnolia.
"When we just sit here together and talk about the times she's been through and the way she tells the stories, we're in constant hysterics," she says. "When she came back to Delaware from Las Vegas two years ago, we must have sat outside on our deck for hours just laughing."
They were laughing about the guy she had married three times, the one with salt-and-pepper hair whose sexual technique Ashley still extols with shining eyes.
Dealing with the demons of her past
There's something disconcerting about the way Bonnie Ashley riffles through the divorce papers, marriage licenses, and photographs of the men with whom she's briefly shared her life.
She cudgels her memory for dates and the reasons why she divorced, or even married to begin with.
"I don't see how people expect me to remember all this B.S.," she says.
The documents and pictures fit in a box, fading there like her recollections of the men they represent.
The box also holds mementos from her family, including pictures and doggerel from her mother, who died of cancer, making fun of how many different last names her daughter earned over the decades.
She was born Bonnie Raye Brittingham, one of five children, to an itinerant preacher. Because the family moved so much, she never latched on to friends.
She's had as many different last names as she's had places she's moved: Maryland to Delaware, Texas, South Carolina, Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and Delaware again.
Is Ashley her last married name?
"After you've been married and divorced 11 times, who cares?" she asks.
What's really important in the world of self-published memoirs is learning how to enjoy putting yourself out there while exorcising demons, slowly squeezing out the soaked sponge of a water-logged soul that stubbornly retained each adolescent slight, each nasty remark dripped on it by your old man or your mean-spirited brother.
Some of us just get over that stuff.
Some of us don't, but hide it really well.
Some of us just plain don't.
Instead, Bonnie Ashley got married, repeatedly, looking for a man who will finally love her like daddy should have, in a forever-attempt not be the worst thing that little Bonnie was taught she could have been.
"I was desperate, not dumb," Ashley says. "I was taught that a man took care of you. So each time I didn't have one, I heard, 'Old Maid!'
"That's what my dad called any single woman over 25."
There is something ironic about the fact that Ashley now is an unmarried woman in her 50s, with a little sign hanging in her kitchen that reminds everyone, "You Are the Author of Your Own Life."
A good man is hard to find
Needless to say -- but said regardless and repeatedly -- men are shallow.
"I'm sure there's a good man out there," Bonnie Ashley says. "But I don't know him, and my friends don't know him, either."
Men only need three things to be happy, she discovered: a remote control, food in their belly and sex.
"We're wired differently," Ashley says of her own gender. "I can't expect a man to be nurturing, to know my favorite color. There's just not as much depth to a man as there is to a woman."
Fine, so why marry so often?
"I told my mom that I would marry 27 times till I got it right," she says.
She wanted to feel secure. She wanted to be loved.
But she just got tired after 11 tries.
Ashley in part blames her rabid rate of divorce on the fact that she cannot have children.
"I don't think I would have just walked out on them if we had kids," she says.
She has gotten over some things.
She doesn't care what anyone calls her, even her old man.
"When you write a book about it, you don't care," she says. "[Expletive] all of you. That's my attitude."
She'll never marry again, she says.
"I'll sleep around, but that's all."
Ashley says that her life is rounded not by a sleep, but by a curse: the curse of birth , and the curse of death.
"In between, life is painful, sad, empty and lonely."
It's not that she wants to die, she insists: "I'd rather never have been born. I did not ask to be born."
But take heart, reader. Bonnie Ashley has some things to teach you, and it's not all gloom.
"Here's why women should read my book," she says. "So they understand what can happen if you marry someone you really don't know."
It's a lesson she recently learned.
Even after the 11 marriages and divorces, she asked this last guy (the one she kicked out of the house two weeks ago) to ask her to marry him. She did this only a few weeks after they met.
He refused.
With your track record, he told her, I'd have to know you for a long time.
"It was such a rude awakening," she says.
He moved in for a while, moved out, then came back until she finally kicked him out.
"Someone had to force me to learn how not to want to get married," she says.
Meanwhile, she's writing the sequel, of her last triad of Las Vegas weddings and divorces, all with the same guy, and with whom the sex was great.
And she'll write a book about her two suicide attempts.
"I have so much to tell people," she says.
She's writing for those perennial self-help reasons: Maybe, Ashley says, I can help you not make the same mistakes I did.
But one can't help but ask, just one more time: Will you ever get married again?
The little girl comes back, smiling, too coy for words.
Maybe?
"The only difference now is I don't want to be married just to be married," she says. "I need to get to know you first."
Well, that's something, anyway.
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