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WORK TITLE: The Electric Woman
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.tessafontaine.com
CITY:
STATE: SC
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2017071444
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Fontaine, Tessa
Found in: The electric woman, 2018: ECIP t.p. (Tessa Fontaine)
Publisher's www homepage, December 1, 2017 (Tessa
Fontaine's writing has appeared in PANK, Seneca Review,
The Rumpus, Sideshow World, and elsewhere. She holds an
MFA from the University of Alabama and is working on a
PhD in creative writing at the University of Utah. She
also eats fire and charms snakes, among other sideshow
feats. She lives in South Carolina.)
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PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:University of Alabama, M.F.A.; University of Utah, doctoral student in creative writing.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Has taught for New York Times summer journeys, at the Universities of Alabama and Utah, in prisons in Alabama and Utah, and founded a Salt Lake City Writers in the Schools program. Has performed her one-woman plays in theatres ranging from New York to San Francisco.
AWARDS:Graduate departmental awards in fiction, nonfiction and poetry, 2012, and awards in fiction and nonfiction, 2013, University of Alabama; AWP Intro Award in Nonfiction, 2016; University of Utah’s Academic Fellowship; University of Alabama’s National Alumni Fellowship, Boone Fellowship, Truman Capote Award and First-Year Teaching Award; recieved awards and fellowships from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Taft Nicholson Center, Writing by Writers, and Squaw Valley Community of Writers.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to periodicals including PANK, Seneca Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Autre, Rumpus, Glamour, LitHub, DIAGRAM, New Orleans Review, Brevity, Sideshow World, and others.
SIDELIGHTS
Tessa Fontaine is an American writer whose debut, the memoir The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts, earned high praise from critics. The book recounts Fontaine’s five months as a performer in the sideshow, World of Wonders, in 2013. It is also a rumination on her relationship with her mother, who suffered a major stroke three years prior to that, as well as a reflection on the history of sideshows and circuses.
Writing in TNB.com, Fontaine remarked on the various inspirations for this memoir: “At first, I hope the book could be a distanced, journalistic account of America’s last traveling sideshow, but the monster living in me disagreed. The sideshow was inexorably tied up with the story of my mom’s long illness—she suffered a massive stroke that left her permanently unable to speak or walk—and watching her suffer, trying to help, failing to help, rethinking the risk we choose for our bodies, all of that was part of my sideshow story. … Although it’s a memoir, I think the book is mostly about other people: my mom & stepdad, and the sideshow performers.”
The Electric Woman is “fragmented and imagistic,” according to Rachel Khong, writing in the New York Times Online. It opens with scenes from a fire-eating class Fontaine takes in preparation for a job with a traveling sideshow. She learns, regarding the fire-eating trick or the electric woman-trick, that there really is no trick involved. Entertainers actually eat fire by eating fire. The reader learns that this job came about as the result of an assignment in her creative writing class, interviewing Chris Christ of the World of Wonders, the last of the traveling sideshows in the United States. Christ offered Fontaine the chance to tour with the show during the summer season, and she jumped at the chance to become what is known as the “bally girl,” who would attract crowds into the real show by performing magic tricks, charming snakes, or eating fire. It would be the perfect distraction from the pain of her mother’s condition. Fontaine also delineates the lines of her connection to her mother, who left her and her then husband to find freedom and her true self. An adventurous young woman, Fontaine’s mother, Theresa, was also an entertainer of sorts and a risk taker. Fontaine would later re-unite with her mother, stepfather, and stepbrother, but always had a tenuous relationship, as she recounts in the memoir.
The work shifts back and forth between her work at the sideshow and her mother’s long recovery. For three years Fontaine and her stepfather, who had been her mother’s childhood sweetheart, took care of Theresa, showing not only compassion but true love. Finally, the stepfather decided it was time for them to begin living again, and he planned a trip to Italy with Theresa, still paralyzed and unable to speak. It was during their time in Europe that Fontaine quite literally ran away to the circus to find some reprieve. During the five months with the show, Fontaine learns how hard life is for these people, working fifteen-hour days, living out of vans as they traveled from Florida to Pennsylvania to Minnesota to Kansas to Arkansas and back to Florida. Readers come to know members of the sideshow, such as Sunshine, who is the target for the knife-thrower, Spif; the clown, Snickers; and the manager, Tommy, among others. Some members cannot handle to entire tour, others, such as Fontaine, stick out the entire ordeal. These sections dealing with the sideshow are juxtaposed against her mother’s long and difficult recovery and are also interwoven with bits of historical lore about famous sideshow entertainers and their lives. Fontaine’s tour with the sideshow and her mother’s trip to Italy come to conclusion at about the same time, and in the end, Fontaine manages to come to terms with her mother and her choices in life, repairing the hurt she felt at the age of two when Theresa abandoned her.
“In this memoir that seamlessly balances grief, loss and wild-eyed determination, Fontaine makes a compelling case for using fear as an unexpected gift,” noted BookPage reviewer Vanessa Willoughby of The Electric Woman. Similarly, Booklist contributor Julia Smith commented: “Fascinating and heartfelt, Fontaine’s memoir brushes with death but, more important, finds life and light in unexpected places, giving value to otherness in an unpredictable world.” A Publishers Weekly writer was also impressed, observing: “This remarkable, beautifully written memoir explores the depth of mother-daughter love and the courageous acts of overcoming fear and accepting change.”
“Voice is crucial in memoir,” noted Star Tribune critic Laurie Hertzel, “and Fontaine’s is just right: trustworthy, intimate and thoughtful.” Hertzel added: “Fontaine has a great eye for detail, and she depicts the other circus performers with real affection — not as freaks, but as interesting and fully realized people.” Khong, writing in the New York Times Online, had further praise for The Electric Woman, commenting, “This is an assured debut that doesn’t shy away from the task of holding the ordinary and otherworldly in its hand, at once. It’s herein that the book’s power lies. … In the end, The Electric Woman is about probing mysteries to which there is actually no mystery, but also no end. The woman in a box is disfigured, plain and simple; it’s an act that purports to be magic, and it is and it isn’t. Equally true and mystifying is the fact that we love — it’s plain and extraordinary and impossible to put into words. The ways in which mothers and daughters hurt each other, even as they love each other, are in themselves a world of wonder.” Tampa Bay Times Online reviewer Colette Bancroft also had a high assessment of this memoir, noting: “The Electric Woman is, among other things, an intimate portrait of a subculture that might be dying but still is vividly enthralling — and sometimes frightening. … The Electric Woman is also a meditation upon the body, how we and others perceive our bodies, what we do with and to them.” And Blog Los Angeles Review of Books writer Nathan Scott McNamara concluded: “Fontaine’s memoir … is about living in the aftermath of this family tragedy. … The Electric Woman is about keeping life special, against all odds. … Much of the magnificence of The Electric Woman rests in the realization that almost anything can be made beautiful, at least for a time.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 1, 2018, Julia Smith, review of The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts, p. 42.
BookPage, May, 2018, Vanessa Willoughby, review of The Electric Woman, p. 27.
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2018, review of The Electric Woman.
Publishers Weekly, August 1, 2016, Rachel Deahl, “Fontaine Takes ‘Freak’ to FSG,” p. 8; January 15, 2018, review of The Electric Woman, p. 48.
Star Tribune (Minneapolis MN), May 13, 2018, Laurie Hertzel, review of The Electric Woman.
Xpress Reviews, February 16, 2018, Kate Stewart, review of The Electric Woman.
ONLINE
Elle Online, https://www.elle.com/ (May 13, 2018), Maham Hasan, review of Electric Woman.
Blog Los Angeles Review of Books, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/ (June 2, 2018), Nathan Scott McNamara, review of Electric Woman.
Macmillan website, https://us.macmillan.com/ (June 28, 2018), “Tessa Fontaine.”
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (May 24, 2018), Rachel Khong, review of The Electric Woman.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (June 28, 2018), “Tessa Fontaine.”
Sandstone Press website, http://sandstonepress.com/ (June 28, 2018), “Tessa Fontaine.”
Tampa Bay Times Online, http://www.tampabay.com/ (June 21, 2018), Colette Bancroft, review of Electric Woman.
Tessa Fontaine website, http://www.tessafontaine.com (June 28, 2018).
TNB.com, http://thenervousbreakdown.com/ (June 22, 2018), “Tessa Fontaine: The TNB Self-Interview.”
Tessa Fontaine’s writing has appeared in PANK, Seneca Review, The Rumpus, Sideshow World, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Alabama and is working on a PhD in creative writing at the University of Utah. She also eats fire and charms snakes, among other sideshow feats. She lives in South Carolina. The Electric Woman is her first book.
Tessa Fontaine is the author of The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, an Amazon Editors' Best of the Month featured debut, an iBooks favorite, and more.
Tessa spent the 2013 season performing with the last American traveling circus sideshow, the World of Wonders. Essays about the sideshow won the 2016 AWP Intro Award in Nonfiction, and have appeared in The Rumpus, Hayden's Ferry Review, Autre, and elsewhere. Other work can be found in Glamour, LitHub, FSG's Works in Progress, Creative Nonfiction, The Normal School, Seneca Review, DIAGRAM, New Orleans Review, [PANK], Brevity, and more.
Raised outside San Francisco, Tessa got her MFA from the University of Alabama and is currently a doctoral student in creative writing at the University of Utah. She is the recipient of the University of Alabama’s 2012 graduate departmental awards in fiction, nonfiction and poetry, and the 2013 awards in fiction and nonfiction. She has won the University of Utah’s Academic Fellowship and the University of Alabama’s National Alumni Fellowship, Boone Fellowship, Truman Capote Award and First-Year Teaching Award, and has recieved awards and fellowships from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Taft Nicholson Center, Writing by Writers, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and more.
She has taught for the New York Times summer journeys, at the Universities of Alabama and Utah, in prisons in Alabama and Utah, and founded a Salt Lake City Writers in the Schools program.
Around the country, she has performed her one-woman plays in theatres ranging from New York to San Francisco. The scar on her cheek from a 2am whip act is slowly fading.
Tessa Fontaine is the author of The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts (FSG, May 2018). Her writing has appeared in PANK, Seneca Review, The Rumpus, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere, including Hayden's Ferry Review, where her essay that won the AWP Intro Award was published. She has been teaching in prisons for five years, and founded a Writers in the Schools program in Salt Lake City
Tessa’s other work has appeared in other journals such as PANK and Seneca Review. Tessa holds an MFA from the University of Alabama and is currently a PhD student in creative writing at the University of Utah, where she is working on a novel.
QUOTE:
At first, I hope the book could be a distanced, journalistic account of America’s last traveling sideshow, but the monster living in me disagreed. The sideshow was inexorably tied up with the story of my mom’s long illness—she suffered a massive stroke that left her permanently unable to speak or walk—and watching her suffer, trying to help, failing to help, rethinking the risk we choose for our bodies, all of that was part of my sideshow story. ... Although it’s a memoir, I think the book is mostly about other people: my mom & stepdad, and the sideshow performers."
Tessa Fontaine: The TNB Self-Interview
By TNB Nonfiction
June 22, 2018
Memoir
Congrats on publishing your first book, The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death Defying Acts. How exciting! It must be wild to walk down the street and have people recognize you and take pictures with you and stuff!
That’s never happened.
Hm. Even when you stand in a bookstore and hold the book up in front of your head so a passerby can see that your face matches the face on the back of the jacket?
Right. Not then either.
I guess I’ll change my line of questioning, then.
Good idea.
WHY did you write this?
That’s more like it. I felt like a starving, razor-clawed monster was living inside my body, flicking my heart so it raced and tearing at my guts to get out. I’d never felt that before, that obsessive, relentless drive to tell a particular story. At first, I hope the book could be a distanced, journalistic account of America’s last traveling sideshow, but the monster living in me disagreed. The sideshow was inexorably tied up with the story of my mom’s long illness—she suffered a massive stroke that left her permanently unable to speak or walk—and watching her suffer, trying to help, failing to help, rethinking the risk we choose for our bodies, all of that was part of my sideshow story. That’s one of the things that struck me so much about the sideshow, that there were these extraordinary performers choosing to do dangerous acts and assume risk over and over again, acts that are sometimes painful—and how surprisingly parallel that was with the way my mom had to suffer in her various therapies as she worked so hard to try to recover, and then chose to suffer as she and my stepdad decided to take a long-delayed trip around the world, from which nobody thought they’d return. That suffering was necessary for the eventual wonder.
Why DID you write this?
Did means the writing of it is past, and while that is true, it is also not entirely right. In some ways, I don’t remember writing The Electric Woman—I know I did, obsessively, for two and a half years, and yet there are only a few shimmering moments of writing I remember, those rare unicorn experiences where a section comes out almost fully formed, as close as I have ever gotten to what people mean when they’ve captured the muse. But where are all the other memories of writing it, all those hours at the desk/couch/in bed/in a coffee shop/scribbling something on the back of a receipt while I’m in an airport bathroom? If they happened in the past, why aren’t they stored in my memory? Maybe writing occurs outside linear time. Though the book is now published and past the point where I’m allowed to make edits, I am still thinking about experiences I recount in the book, and the way I recount them, and why. Did I do a fair enough job? Would I recount them in the same way now? Why did I include that dull sentence? Why didn’t I remember that rain created suction in the tent stake holes? I think it would be interesting if a writer could edit and rerelease their book every few years. Not interesting to readers, probably, and a real nightmare for publishers, but certainly interesting to think about how a writer would choose to tell the same story differently over the course of their life. Though there’s an idea that we all just write our same obsessive story again and again. And maybe I’m already doing that. The novel I’m working on now has some parallel obsessions. Shit.
Why did YOU write this?
Although it’s a memoir, I think the book is mostly about other people: my mom & stepdad, and the sideshow performers. I am the physical connection point between those stories, but it was through watching their bodies, through understanding the historical context of sideshow performers who came before, and trying to understand who my mom was when she was a young woman and when I was young—the ways I’d misinterpreted her, perhaps—that the stories felt impossible to separate. We are each capable of writing our own exact stories. That’s the loveliest thing about teaching—the privilege of watching people find ways to tell theirs. But to get back to the question—I doubted myself a lot. Though I was made to write by my nasty internal monster, I was often not sure if a certain story was mine to tell. Would my sharing this particular story, I’d wonder, bring harm to this person? Did this person know I was taking daily notes? Is this little anecdote necessary for the larger story? And though those questions were anxiety-producing, I think they’re a necessary part of the process. To be an ethical writer, especially of nonfiction, questions of voice and agency are constant companions.
Why did you WRITE this?
Ok, ok, I’d love for this to have been a painting. Or TV show. Or graphic novel. Or poem. Or Broadway musical. Or movie. Or podcast. Or radio drama. Or series of greeting cards. If I’d had the skills to transform the medium in a way that better suited the story, boy howdy, I sure would have. But I don’t know how to sing opera, or paint with watercolors, or make Claymation well enough to tell the story. So, I wrote the damn thing.
Why did you write THIS?
UGH. I really tried not to! I wanted to write comedic stories about animals, like David Sedaris. Writing should be fun, I think sometimes, wiping tears from my cheeks and wine from my chin. But what writing should also be is married to obsession. I like to think about writing in terms of obsession, because the things we’re genuinely interested in, delighted by, the threads we tug and tug reflect our particular way of thinking—and that is one of the things that makes reading so exciting. An example is Amy Leach’s book of essays, Things That Are, which my friend Nate described to me as “nature essays on acid.” It’s perfect. Each little essay follows a series of acrobatic leaps of logic that make each sentence feel surprising and delightful, so the pleasure in reading comes not just from the subject matter, but also from the way we follow Leach’s logic between ideas as she connects disparate objects we’d have never put together ourselves. Years before I began writing The Electric Woman, before I even knew the sideshow I’d eventually join, the World of Wonders, existed, I was obsessed with sideshows. My stepdad told me stories about a very early friendship he had with a retired sideshow performer, a little person, whose mother had been a bearded lady. I had no idea what path would unfold when I started doing my own research, even when I joined the show. But I followed my obsession. My mom’s stroke and suffering was another obsession. It was a very hard, very painful obsession that was a big part of my daily life. Nothing I wrote could be separated from it, because it was the defining lens of my experience. But maybe a few projects down the line, I’ll get to those comedic animal stories.
Can you do a cartwheel?
No. Why would you bring that up?
TESSA FONTAINE is the author of The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, Amazon Editors’ Best Books of 2018 so far, New York Times Editor’s pick, and more. Other work can be found or is forthcoming in Glamour, The Believer, LitHub, FSG’s Works in Progress, Creative Nonfiction, The Rumpus, and other fine publications. She won the 2016 AWP Intro Award in Nonfiction, and has taught for the New York Times summer journeys, at the Universities of Alabama and Utah, in prisons in Alabama and Utah, and founded a Salt Lake City Writers in the Schools program. She lives with her fella and her fine pup in South Carolina.
QUOTE:
In this memoir that seamlessly balances grief, loss and wild-eyed determination, Fontaine makes a compelling case for using fear as an unexpected gift.
THE ELECTRIC WOMAN
Vanessa Willoughby
BookPage. (May 2018): p27.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
THE ELECTRIC WOMAN
By Tessa Fontaine
FSG $27, 384 pages ISBN 9780374158378 Audio, eBook available
The threat of mortality has a peculiar way of amplifying a person's regrets. The Electric Woman, an honest and emotionally vulnerable memoir by Tessa Fontaine, chronicles the author's relationship with her mother, who suffered a massive stroke that left her a shadow of her former self.
Inspired by her mother's lust for life, Fontaine decides to challenge herself and conquer her fears. She says of her mother, "She's a yes person, a woman of adventure. When I begin to doubt that I can pull this off, I stop and think of her." On a whim, the author accepts an invitation to join a traveling circus. Although she essentially bluffs her way into a job, Fontaine quickly finds herself fully immersed in the rag-tag carnival lifestyle. She is drawn to this world of illusions and the carnival workers' ability to seamlessly transform onstage. Fontaine takes up the acts of escape artist, snake charmer and "Electric Woman," an act during which she lights bulbs with her tongue.
Fontaine partially frames her memoir as an anthropological investigation. She is a stranger in a strange land, observing the various characters that comprise the circus. Yet despite her misgivings, she finds a genuine camaraderie with her carnival co-workers. Throughout the circus narrative, Fontaine soberly recounts hospital visits with her mother in the Bay Area, her obvious love for her mother permeating each interaction like perfume.
In this memoir that seamlessly balances grief, loss and wild-eyed determination, Fontaine makes a compelling case for using fear as an unexpected gift.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Willoughby, Vanessa. "THE ELECTRIC WOMAN." BookPage, May 2018, p. 27. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537055067/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=83213bed. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537055067
QUOTE:
Fascinating and heartfelt, Fontaine's memoir brushes with death but, more important, finds life and light in unexpected places, giving value to otherness in an unpredictable world.
The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts
Julia Smith
Booklist. 114.15 (Apr. 1, 2018): p42.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts. By Tessa Fontaine. May 2018.384p. Farrar, $27 (9780374158378). 799.5.
Fontaine's trip to Gibsonton, Florida, became much more than a casual glimpse into the lives of the sideshow performers who reside there. Her conversation with Chris Christ of the World of Wonders (the last traveling sideshow in the U.S.) led to an invitation to join it for the summer season--as a performer. Fontaine, 29, quickly agreed and, with no experience to speak of, found herself their new bally girl, meaning that she would perform magic, charm snakes, eat fire, and escape handcuffs to entice crowds to the real show. While the sideshow narrative progresses linearly, another thread devoted to her mother's debilitating stroke two-and-a-half years earlier does not. The reflections on the latter bounce in time, integrating recollections of Fontaine's youth, the stroke itself, and its nightmarish aftermath. They are intercut with Fontaine's experiences on the road, sometimes acting as parallels or counterpoints, sometimes as simple insights into the life she was briefly escaping. Fascinating and heartfelt, Fontaine's memoir brushes with death but, more important, finds life and light in unexpected places, giving value to otherness in an unpredictable world.--Julia Smith
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Smith, Julia. "The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2018, p. 42. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534956829/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=27384e8f. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534956829
Fontaine, Tessa: THE ELECTRIC WOMAN
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Fontaine, Tessa THE ELECTRIC WOMAN Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 5, 1 ISBN: 978-0-374-15837-8
A writer performs in a traveling sideshow tour after spending three years with her mother as she endured a series of debilitating strokes.
In her debut memoir, Fontaine explores the power of the mother-daughter bond and the resiliency and marvel of the human body under duress. In October 2010, the author's mother suffered the first of several strokes. She was left severely incapacitated and in the care of her husband, Fontaine's stepfather. Yet in the summer of 2013, at great risk to her health, they set off together for an ambitious trip to Italy, refusing to give in to her physical limitations. On a whim, the author set off on her own adventure, signing on as a carnival performer in America's last traveling sideshow, the World of Wonders. For the next 150 days, she tested her physical endurance and deeply ingrained fears, acquiring skills as a fire eater, snake charmer, and escape artist, among other sideshow feats, and investigating the unique culture and often grueling realities of carnival life. Fontaine is a graceful writer, and her story initially shows great promise as she seamlessly weaves together a chronicle of her often bizarre carnival experiences with poignant memories of her mother before and after her illness. But as the narrative segues into a lengthy day-to-day account of her experiences on the tour, it becomes less urgently involved with her connection to her mother and reads more like a journalistic reporting exercise. Though the author is careful to recount her dedicated immersion within this world, there's an emotional detachment that grows more evident in her encounters with the individuals who inhabit this space. After several weeks on the tour, as the wonders begin to grow thin and somewhat repetitive, the story loses momentum. Though her tale eventually leads to a moving and satisfying conclusion, the journey is unnecessarily arduous.
A sometimes-engrossing but overlong memoir about carnival life and family bonds.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Fontaine, Tessa: THE ELECTRIC WOMAN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650571/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d8007f38. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530650571
Fontaine takes 'freak' to FSG
Rachel Deahl
Publishers Weekly. 263.31 (Aug. 1, 2016): p8.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Jenna Johnson, in her first acquisition at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, took North American rights, at auction, to Tessa Fontaine's debut memoir, Freak. The book, which Trident Media Group's Ellen Levine sold, chronicles the author's experience as a new performer in a traveling sideshow, where she did everything from swallow swords to play a character called the Electric Woman. The author melds tales about circus life, FSG said, with her discovery of "her mother's catastrophic illness, and her search for the possibilities of life and hope after heartbreak."
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Deahl, Rachel. "Fontaine takes 'freak' to FSG." Publishers Weekly, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 8. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A460285623/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a78d756b. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460285623
Fontaine, Tessa. The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts
Kate Stewart
Xpress Reviews. (Feb. 16, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
Fontaine, Tessa. The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts. Farrar. May 2018. 384p. ISBN 9780374158378. $27; ebk. ISBN 9780374717025. MEMOIR
In this memoir, Fontaine recounts one season working on a traveling sideshow, the World of Wonders. Starting as a bally girl, she works her way up from learning simple acts such as holding a boa constrictor and escaping from handcuffs to eating fire and shocking herself with electricity. Interspersed with the sideshow stories are Fontaine's struggles to care for her mother after a stroke and memories of her childhood. Unfortunately, the book struggles with a lack of action and is weighted down with gross-out episodes and repetitive, dull details of sideshow life, such as setting up and breaking down the tent every time the show moves to a new fair.
Verdict Fontaine does not make much of a case for any larger meaning in her experiences, and considering that she doesn't seem to enjoy working as a sideshow performer, it's unclear why she chose to do it.--Kate Stewart, Arizona Historical Soc., Tucson
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Stewart, Kate. "Fontaine, Tessa. The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts." Xpress Reviews, 16 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530232539/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e70bef77. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530232539
QUOTE:
This remarkable, beautifully written memoir explores the depth of mother-daughter love and the courageous acts of overcoming fear and accepting change.
The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts
Publishers Weekly. 265.3 (Jan. 15, 2018): p48.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts
Tessa Fontaine. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27 (384p) ISBN 978-0-374-15837-8
In the opening pages of this fascinating memoir, first-time author Fontaine learns how to eat fire. This is just one of several "death-defying" feats she learned during her stint with the World of Wonders, "the very last traveling sideshow of its kind." Intrigued by illusion and danger, Fontaine--a grad student studying writing--accepted a surprising invitation to join the show. Not only did she yearn for adventure but she also hoped to temporarily escape from assisting her mother after her mother suffered a debilitating stroke. Fontaine segues between hospital visits to her mother in California's Bay Area and the fantastical world of the carnival, where Fontaine learned to handle snakes, swallow swords, free herself from handcuffs, and eventually master the role of "the electric woman," lighting light bulbs with her tongue. Traveling state and county fairs, Fontaine shares the unusual stories of her fellow carnival workers, all of whom come across as devoted to the exhausting, grueling, yet inspiring work they do each day. Fontaine explores the history of the carnival (e.g., the first incubators were on display in a carnival sideshow in the early 20th century); its pecking order of performers, carnies, and foodies; its humor and dark underbelly. This remarkable, beautifully written memoir explores the depth of mother-daughter love and the courageous acts of overcoming fear and accepting change. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts." Publishers Weekly, 15 Jan. 2018, p. 48. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A523888917/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=617f7148. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A523888917
'
QUOTE:
Voice is crucial in memoir, and Fontaine's is just right: trustworthy, intimate and thoughtful.
Fontaine has a great eye for detail, and she depicts the other circus performers with real affection -- not as freaks, but as interesting and fully realized people:
You eat fire by eating fire'; NONFICTION: After her adventurous mother is felled by a series of strokes, Tessa Fontaine runs off to join the circus in this thrilling, moving memoir
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN). (May 13, 2018): Lifestyle:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Star Tribune Media Company LLC
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Byline: LAURIE HERTZEL; STAFF WRITER
Imagine that you have been timid all your life, but your mother -- oh, she is a firecracker. She once bought out Chinatown to decorate the house for a Chinese-themed Christmas -- hundreds of red paper lanterns and umbrellas and imitation jade cats and a huge dragon that she suspended from the ceiling. As a teenager, she skipped school in order to perform stunts on a surfboard. As a young woman, she ran away from her husband and baby -- that would be you -- to be with the man she truly loved. She never said no to adventure. You always felt pale and meek next to her. And then imagine that she suffered a series of strokes and is now in a hospital, unable to feed herself or speak, the light gone from her eyes. What do you do? If you're Tessa Fontaine, you spend three years taking care of her and then you abruptly run away and join the circus. Fontaine's memoir, "The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts," is astounding, amazing, inspiring and a little bit terrifying. It's a story about a mother and daughter's complicated relationship, and it's also a coming-of-age story, of sorts. It would be safe to say that Fontaine came of age in a most peculiar way -- eating fire, charming snakes, escaping from handcuffs and performing as the Electric Woman, illuminating a light bulb with her tongue. Voice is crucial in memoir, and Fontaine's is just right: trustworthy, intimate and thoughtful. She mulls her mother's illness; she mulls her mother's betrayal; she admits to being terrified of snakes; she weeps in fear the first time she holds one. She's disappointed to find that there is no trick to eating fire, no mirrors. "You eat fire," she writes, "by eating fire." And if that's not a metaphor for getting through life, I don't know what is. Fontaine has a great eye for detail, and she depicts the other circus performers with real affection -- not as freaks, but as interesting and fully realized people: Sunshine, "the target half of the knife-throwing act"; Spif, the throwing half; Tommy, the circus manager; Snickers, the clown; those who wash out; and those who stick it out for the whole season. Fontaine sticks it out for the whole season, spending five months with the World of Wonders and traveling from Florida to Pennsylvania to Minnesota to Kansas to Arkansas and back to Florida, stopping at points in between. The circus workers are hardworking and dedicated to their show, putting it up and tearing it down in city after city, rushing out during a tornado warning to take down the banners, which they can't afford to replace; getting by on four hours of sleep a night for months. Fontaine's circus adventures are nicely juxtaposed against her mother's long journey of recovery, as both women learn to overcome their fears and meet life's challenges. Fontaine's mother learns not just how to communicate again, and to eat, but how to embrace life with a paralyzed body. (It is no surprise that she heads off to Italy, in a wheelchair.) And Fontaine herself learns to embrace life with a little of her mother's verve. Over time, she grows from timid to confident, learning how to grapple with the long, heavy tent poles; how to escape from handcuffs; how to open her mouth and swallow a flaming torch as though it were life itself. Laurie Hertzel is the senior editor for books at the Star Tribune. On Facebook: facebook.com/startribunebooks. On Twitter: @StribBooks
The Electric Woman By: Tessa Fontaine. Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 366 pages, $27.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"'You eat fire by eating fire'; NONFICTION: After her adventurous mother is felled by a series of strokes, Tessa Fontaine runs off to join the circus in this thrilling, moving memoir." Star Tribune [Minneapolis, MN], 13 May 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538598954/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ed933c53. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538598954
QUOTE:
This is an assured debut that doesn’t shy away from the task of holding the ordinary and otherworldly in its hand, at once. It’s herein that the book’s power lies.
The book is fragmented and imagistic.
n the end, “The Electric Woman” is about probing mysteries to which there is actually no mystery, but also no end. The woman in a box is disfigured, plain and simple; it’s an act that purports to be magic, and it is and it isn’t. Equally true and mystifying is the fact that we love — it’s plain and extraordinary and impossible to put into words. The ways in which mothers and daughters hurt each other, even as they love each other, are in themselves a world of wonder.
When a Stroke Felled Her Mother, This Author Ran Away to the Circus
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By Rachel Khong
May 24, 2018
THE ELECTRIC WOMAN
A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts
By Tessa Fontaine
366 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.
“The Electric Woman” is a sideshow act: Its star, “Electra,” sits on a chair and conducts electricity with her body, lighting light bulbs with her tongue. She doesn’t just seem to; she does. “There is no trick,” Tessa Fontaine discovers in her first “Introduction to Fire Eating” class at the start of her memoir. “You eat fire by eating fire.” Electrical currents and flames are elements simultaneously otherworldly and ordinary. This is an assured debut that doesn’t shy away from the task of holding the ordinary and otherworldly in its hand, at once. It’s herein that the book’s power lies.
In October 2010, Fontaine’s mother has a hemorrhagic stroke, “as big and bad a stroke as you can have and still be alive.” Her eyes turn from “bright, bright green” to “slug-gray.” She can no longer speak. But “The Electric Woman” is not about a dying mother being cared for by her attentive daughter; it’s not so simple or straightforward, and it’s unabashed about its complicatedness. When her mother’s stroke leaves her all but unresponsive, the author responds by joining a traveling sideshow — the last remaining American sideshow, the World of Wonders. It’s the classic running-away-to-the-circus fantasy: What appeals to her is a place “where the work was physically grueling, where the task was to transform into someone else, someone who could transcend a fragile human body. Someone who was and was not herself onstage.”
Fontaine takes us along on her carnival education as she eats fire, handles a boa constrictor, swallows swords and meets a motley cast of characters that includes a mermaid, a man with no legs, a knife thrower and his “target.”
Interwoven throughout this narrative is the story of her relationship with her mother, a story that is sometimes its own hard-to-watch sideshow act. Fontaine is unafraid to write the ugliness — the imperfect care and love — that takes place between people, and the memoir is most “electric” when it doesn’t shy from that imperfection. Fontaine recalls a particularly poignant conversation with her mother: “‘There’s one thing missing from my life,’ she told me when I was 21. ‘One thing that has been the biggest heartbreak of my life. The biggest hole. It’s you. It’s that you don’t love me.’ I didn’t say anything back.”
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Guilt hangs over the author like a cloud for not being able to say the simplest sentence: “I could feel the words taut in my throat, getting so close that they pressed against the back of my teeth like an animal trying to escape.” In probing these questions, Fontaine exhibits flashes of brilliance. Picturing her mother in the past, she defines motherhood generally in a distilled and perfect phrase: “a person whom I did not possess, who did not possess me.”
These weaknesses that are foundational to the human spirit are also crucial to the book’s power. It’s an illness memoir without saints; its heroines a flawed mother and her flawed daughter. Speaking to her mother after the stroke, Fontaine observes how “my never-gentle-enough voice reminds her the thing in her hand is fabric, not a glass of water, is lotion, not a slice of apple, is tweezers, is a stone, and my hand will quickly but firmly move to her hand and guide the object away from her parted lips, and I will feel sorry for having done so.” In this passage and others — for instance, when the post-surgical bandage around her mother’s head looks “like a piece of popcorn that had begun bursting from its kernel” — I’m stunned by the beauty of Fontaine’s rhythms and images.
The book is fragmented and imagistic. Fontaine narrates scenes from the hospital, then cuts to the circus, then cuts to historical sideshows for context. At their best, the various settings provide perfect reprieve: Before we have the chance to weary of the present-day sideshow, we’re whisked into those of yore, only to end up right back at her mother’s bedside. In one of these historical vignettes, Fontaine tells the story of a two-pound baby named Lucille Horn who, in 1920 (when infant mortality was common), was taken to the Coney Island sideshow, where a man named Dr. Martin Couney charged admission to see premature babies in glass incubators — a revolutionary development that wasn’t yet the standard in neonatal facilities. Couney kept thousands of babies alive using his machines, and charging admission fees was how he funded his research. Lucille spent six months in Couney’s incubator, then was taken home, where she lived to the age of 96. “Sometimes, a sideshow can save a daughter,” Fontaine writes.
What is our true identity, and what’s just a performance? The sideshow acts occasionally serve as their own pertinent metaphors. “Ms. Olga Hess, the Headless Woman” has “a metal pole where a head should be.” It’s an illusion, of course; she is part of “the world of box jumpers”: a tradition in which women contort their bodies and slip into and between boxes. Whether you’re a four-legged woman or a spider woman, what the audience sees is just pieces of you. Fontaine writes: “You will be whole only when nobody is looking at you.”
There is, at times, an “Orange Is the New Black” feeling to “The Electric Woman,” with Fontaine as the Piper Kerman to the rest of the sideshow: Everyone else’s story is far more interesting, including an amazing anecdote involving a Chihuahua that I won’t spoil. The book is longer than it needs to be, and that is its main drawback. There’s the sense that Fontaine manages to distill other people’s stories more succinctly than her own. Certain points are drilled home ad infinitum: Fontaine’s mother insists that Tessa is special and smart — much smarter than she is; Tommy, the circus manager, appears over and over to say just how “physically” and “mentally” taxing this life is, as though the author does not trust that we sufficiently understand how challenging it is for her to stay.
Leaving the circus tent, one day, a woman from the audience is unimpressed. “It was boring,” she says. “We were hoping for blood and guts. … We didn’t see anything cool, no extreme gore at all.” On occasion, I as a reader see myself in her: the member of the audience who is unmoved, who wants more. When Fontaine becomes the Electric Woman — you knew, of course, she was going to — it’s another trickless trick. What she does is sit in the chair, put her hands on metal plates, and conduct electricity with her body. About the unimpressed woman who wanted more blood and guts, Fontaine writes: “Is it unclear that these are real human beings inside the show made up of actual blood, actual guts, some of which they are showing to the audience for two dollars?” And that’s just the thing: The quiet beauty of this book lies in its ordinary, enigmatic human feats of interpersonal connection.
In the end, “The Electric Woman” is about probing mysteries to which there is actually no mystery, but also no end. The woman in a box is disfigured, plain and simple; it’s an act that purports to be magic, and it is and it isn’t. Equally true and mystifying is the fact that we love — it’s plain and extraordinary and impossible to put into words. The ways in which mothers and daughters hurt each other, even as they love each other, are in themselves a world of wonder.
Rachel Khong is the author of “Goodbye, Vitamin.”
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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 13 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Daughter Who Breathed Fire.
When Her Mom Got Sick, Tessa Fontaine Actually Ran Away to the Circus
By Maham Hasan
May 13, 2018
Eating fire in one of the last remaining traveling sideshows in the country may not be a typical response to the grief of facing a mother’s illness, or the inevitable loss to come, but that was precisely what writer Tessa Fontaine did after her mother suffered a paralyzing stroke in 2010. “Bizarrely, I was trying to give her a legacy, running away with the sideshow. To say, ‘I see you, mom. I see the joy that you had in doing beautiful and wild things and I want to do that too,’” she tells me over Skype.
In her memoir The Electric Woman (FSG), which came out this month, Fontaine chronicles her mother’s illness, how she was able to rewrite their uncertain and previously tumultuous relationship, and her adventures with the World of Wonders sideshow.
The Electric Woman Tessa Fontaine
The Electric Woman is out now. READ
FSG
Performing in World of Wonders, which began as an assignment for her MFA program, became a coping mechanism. It was far from an easy act of escapism: The sideshow toured through eight states, and its attractions included fire-breathing, knife-throwing, and snake charming. But it was not learning the acts that was hard, Fontaine writes; it was the tour life itself. They worked 15 or 16 hours a day, seven days a week, and lived out of semi-trucks. Still, after her initial stint, Fontaine stayed on, partly because she knew it was something her adventurous mother would have done. So she scorched off her eyebrows and eyelashes, swallowed painful swords, and untangled snakes from her hair, because her mother was experiencing so much pain—and would soon embark on her own escapade.
No one had expected Fontaine’s mother to make it out of the hospital, let alone still be alive a year after her stroke. Despite bring paralyzed, bound to a wheelchair, and unable to speak, Fontaine’s mother was still fighting. It was then that her stepfather began planning what she refers to as the “suicide trip.” They wanted to take the solo adventure trip to Italy—sans children and restrictions—they’d never gotten around to.
So, in 2013, when her mother and stepfather departed, Fontaine joined the sideshow for five months, as “the ultimate distraction.” “It's a very painful separation, when you stop being someone's child or feeling like you are the person who gets taken care of. I would have chosen to stay in that role forever,” she says. Fontaine discovered she would have to let her mother go over and over again. She mourned a mother she had always been unsure of; their relationship and the person Fontaine had known were gone. She grieved, too, the tragedy of time and the assumption that some future moment would allow her to let go of all her anger and fully let her mother in.
Tessa Fontaine
Tessa Fontaine
Courtesy
Fontaine’s mother had left her father and her when she was two. And while Fontaine rejoined her some years later, to live in a new home with a stepfather and a little brother, she clung to this hurt all her life, feeling alien in the new family her mother had built. She cultivated a distance that sometimes manifested as an even more dissonant emotion. “At fifteen, in the midst of a fight about a friend’s house I was no longer allowed to visit, I told her: ‘I don’t love you,’” she writes. “They weren’t just fighting words, though. Since I was thirteen, I’d known it. I believed it through my early twenties. I didn’t love her.”
Fontaine’s memoir is soaked with regret for that moment, despite her mother probably being wise to teenagers’ feckless cruelty. But back then, this woman made Fontaine skeptical and uncertain. “Some of that was her wildness," she says. "She was not a predictable woman. She did not do the things mothers do that you see in movies or you read in books."
Her mother moved alone to Hawaii shortly after graduating high school, and performed acrobatic feats on the shoulders of surfers. Later, she fished for crab, one of the deadliest jobs in the world, on a boat in Oregon. As a Ms. California runner up, she’d done crazy drawings on the stage in lieu of the traditional talents of singing or dancing. She wore theatrically bold clothes, laughed too loud, and belted tunes even louder. And as a young woman, when she'd seen an opportunity to escape an unhappy marriage, she leapt.
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Fontaine now recognizes and embraces that same wildness in herself: “It took the sideshow for me to recognize it and to pull it out.” She has also come to peace with her mother’s choices after writing The Electric Woman. “I think she was trying her best, and she messed up and was trying to make up for it after. It just took me a long time to be able to say, It’s okay,” she says.
Fontaine’s mother made it through her dream trip and lived for three more years; she even got to watch her daughter perform in the sideshow. In 2016, her mother and stepfather left for Europe again in a boat. But this time, Fontaine and her brother met them in Greece for the last week of the trip. She took her mother swimming, cruised her wheelchair down the streets, and shared that her book had just been bought. A day after they departed, Fontaine’s mother had another stroke on the boat and died. “It does hurt to eat fire, you know—it does hurt to have your mom dying. But bravery is just a matter of doing the thing, even though you're scared. It's not that you stop feeling scared—it's just that you do it anyway,” says Fontaine.
You eat fire. You show up. You watch your mother return from an impossible journey and watch you perform for the last time as “the electric woman.” You plan a new trip together and go with her this time: full circle. As Fontaine writes, “The trick is that there is no trick.”
QUOTE:
The Electric Woman is, among other things, an intimate portrait of a subculture that might be dying but still is vividly enthralling — and sometimes frightening.
The Electric Woman is also a meditation upon the body, how we and others perceive our bodies, what we do with and to them.
Review: Look inside the tent of a Gibsonton-based sideshow in Tessa Fontaine’s memoir ‘The Electric Woman’
Colette BancroftTimes book editor
More articles
Published: June 21, 2018
Updated: June 21, 2018 at 02:31 PM
Grief can unhinge us, disconnect us from our daily lives, make us do things we’ve never done. Grief made Tessa Fontaine run away and join the circus.
To be more exact, the sideshow: World of Wonders, the last traditional traveling sideshow in the country, based in Gibsonton. That journey is the subject of Fontaine’s fascinating new book, The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts.
Standing on an outdoor stage in sequined shorts and fishnet stockings with a boa constrictor draped around her neck for 14 or 16 hours a day as a "bally girl," wooing spectators inside the tent for a look at the headless woman and the man who pierces his own flesh with 3-inch pins, might not seem a likely career path for a 29-year-old creative writing graduate student raised in the San Francisco area.
But that’s what Fontaine signed up for in 2013: five months of grueling labor, lousy living conditions and exhilarating danger on the road with World of Wonders.
What led her there was catastrophic illness, not her own but her mother’s. In 2010, her mother — an adventurous, charismatic woman — had "as big and bad a stroke as you can have and still be alive."
After 2?½ years of harrowing medical emergencies, continued brain bleeding and tough rehab, her mother is still paralyzed on one side of her body and unable to speak except for nonsense syllables, and Fontaine is emotionally drained.
But Fontaine’s stepfather, Davy, insists her mother wants to take a long-dreamed-of trip to Italy, and he’s making plans. The logistics of such a trip for a woman in a wheelchair are challenging, and Fontaine, whose relationship with her mother has always been intense and complicated, obsesses over everything that might go wrong, sure she’ll never see her mom alive again.
It’s in that frazzled state that, on a whim, she travels to Gibsonton to interview Chris Christ, co-owner of World of Wonders.
"I ended up with a snake around my neck because of a conversation with a Giant," she writes. After they talk for hours one night in Christ’s shabby mobile home, he invites her to "come play with us." She shocks herself by agreeing.
She knows absolutely nothing about performing sideshow acts. When she signs up for a fire-eating workshop in California to prepare, she expects to learn tricks of the trade, methods of illusion. Instead, she learns, "There is no trick.
"You eat fire by eating fire."
She’ll learn how to do that, and a lot more. The Electric Woman is, among other things, an intimate portrait of a subculture that might be dying but still is vividly enthralling — and sometimes frightening.
Fontaine introduces us to the structure of that self-contained little society and its rigid pecking order: bosses, showpeople (the sideshow performers), then carnies. As her boss, Sunshine, explains, "And the big carnie rivalry is between game and ride jocks. Ride jocks have more power, because they can let pretty girls go to the front of the line and they gather bigger crowds, but game jocks make more money. Easier to swindle the marks. Foodies are at the bottom, obviously, though some of them make a killing. Don’t call a performer a carnie, okay? ... Like, ever."
Most of the sideshow employees live in plywood bunks stacked inside a semitrailer truck, each bunk with a couple of tiny drawers to stash their underwear and protein bars. They don’t just perform multiple acts; they put up the huge tents and props, then take them all down and pack them back in the truck. Their work days stretch to as much as 18 hours. "As a greenhorn, I make $275 a week, minus taxes," Fontaine writes, and the pay scale does not rise much. A big outing is a middle-of-the-night visit to Walmart.
What they can make from their audience, dollar bill by wrinkled dollar bill, is what keeps the show afloat, quite directly. She learns the meaning of all the "GTFM" tattoos she spots on her co-workers’ arms: "Get the f------ money."
Fontaine also gives us individual portraits of some of the performers, like patient, level-headed Tommy, the show’s boss; Red, the sword-swallower and "blockhead" with a tragic past; and the relentlessly flirtatious Short E, whose legs were amputated when he was a baby and who’s billed as "the world’s shortest daredevil."
The Electric Woman is also a meditation upon the body, how we and others perceive our bodies, what we do with and to them. "Sideshows," Fontaine writes, "are where people come to see public displays of their private fears: of deformity, of a disruption in the perceived gender binary, of mutation, of disfigurement, of a crossover with the animal world, of being out of proportion."
Those public displays have fallen out of fashion, however. "Traveling sideshows are a cultural fragment stomped out by science and social progress. Public perception began shifting at the end of the nineteenth century, as more information about the medical conditions freak shows displayed became known, then even further with disability-rights legislation in the 1950s and ’60s."
The coup de grace, as Christ explains, was reality TV. "People are mostly chickens now. ... Want to sit on their fat asses and see freaks on TV and not have to actually be face-to-face with them. Too scared to see them as people. Easier only to consider them from afar. Chickens---."
Fontaine’s memoir wraps her adventure around the love story between her mother and Davy. They first met as children, but married others. "As soon as he’d heard that my mom was splitting up with her husband," she writes, "Davy had left his job as chief audio engineer at NPR without another job, packed all his things into his car, and driven across the country from D.C. to San Francisco. For her. For the possibility of her." Despite her stroke and all the cruel limits it imposes, they are as much in love as ever.
Trying to understand what has happened to her mother’s body and mind, Fontaine challenges her own. She comes to appreciate Red’s Dr. Frankenstein act, talking spectators through it as he pounds those pins through his arm and cheeks.
"Some barf. Some faint. Falling ovations, everyone calls them. At least one in each town. Compliments, all of them."
And she tries, over and over, to teach herself to swallow a sword, to conquer the gag reflex and let the steel enter her — because again, there’s no trick, just swallowing the sword.
"I feel some relief as I stop imagining the pain of others, and instead, live inside my own potential for catastrophe. As I look for the divine."
QUOTE:
Fontaine’s memoir The Electric Woman is about living in the aftermath of this family tragedy.
But The Electric Woman is about keeping life special, against all odds.
Much of the magnificence of The Electric Woman rests in the realization that almost anything can be made beautiful, at least for a time.
The Trick Is There Is No Trick: Tessa Fontaine’s The Electric Woman
Literature Reviews
By Nathan Scott McNamara06/02/2018
In 2010, Tessa Fontaine’s mother had as big and bad of a stroke as it’s possible to survive. “Don’t hold your breath,” the doctor said. “It doesn’t look good.” Fontaine’s memoir The Electric Woman is about living in the aftermath of this family tragedy. The night of the doctor’s grim prognosis, Fontaine gripped the sink in the hospital bathroom and looked straight in the mirror at her mascara-smeared face. “Human fucking history,” she said to herself. “This is the normal cycle of human history.” Against the throbbing pain shaking through her body, she thought about how people lose their parents and carry on. She thought there must be some innate biological coping mechanism that enabled the numbing of grief. “This is not special,” she made herself say.
But The Electric Woman is about keeping life special, against all odds. Defying all expectations, Fontaine’s mother, Theresa, survives. After three years of home and hospital-bound battles with recurring strokes, Theresa and Fontaine’s stepdad decide that it’s time to live again. Navigating the complications of a body incapable of speech and scarcely capable of motion, they go slowly and intrepidly to Italy. Adrift and seeking relief from her obsession with her mom’s condition, Fontaine ends up joining the last traveling American carnival sideshow. This path begins as an artistic curiosity. Then it consumes and gives structure to her life.
“Sideshows are where people come to see public displays of their private fears: of deformity, of a disruption in the perceived gender binary, of mutation, of disfigurement, of a crossover with the animal world, of being out of proportion,” Fontaine writes. In her case, it is her internal state that is disrupted and out of proportion. Her pain is enormous and her need for distraction immense. The sideshow provides some relief in the form of fire, knives, and electricity — in endless sweat and toil.
Fontaine participates in a five-month carnival season that features the spectacle of her doing inadvisable things with her body both off- and on-stage. There are no extra workers to set up the transportable city of the traveling fair. The setup and cleanup crew is the same crew that dazzles audiences on the stage, usually with some version of proximity to death. “Wow,” Fontaine’s fire-eating teacher says in admiration the first time Fontaine gulps down flames. “You don’t have many instincts for self-preservation.”
The Electric Woman has spiritual similarities to the memoir and movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the story of a French man suffering a major stroke and surviving with locked-in syndrome. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly explores the tension between the prison of an incapacitated body and the spectacle of available to the living mind. Similar to the Diving Bell, while there is plenty that is devastating and harrowing about Fontaine’s memoir, it features a whole cast — extending all the way through Fontaine’s crew of sideshow performers — that are figuring out how to live despite debilitating life circumstances. In the case of The Electric Woman, a traveling fair gorgeously captures this combination of effects. To put on the show, Fontaine and her crew provide and risk their bodies at every stage. The work is bleak, repetitive, and dangerous, and the pay is minimal. But there are moments — at night when the midway is lit up and the Ferris wheels and bumper cars are sparkling — when the effect is transcendent.
Fontaine’s mother is a model for her daughter in terms of pulling this off. When Theresa was young, she used to perform for people on the beaches of Hawaii. She used to climb on top of another surfer’s shoulder and wave regally toward the audience. “She performs fearlessness,” Fontaine writes. Like her mother quivering atop a tandem surfboard, Fontaine learns that the spectacle emerges from the concrete reality. You eat fire by eating fire. Fontaine will do it many times a day for many months. “When I begin to doubt that I can pull this off, I stop and think of her,” Fontaine writes. “The only way to do it is to do it. There is no trick.”
Fontaine and her mother are both dreamers and performers, but their lives are also very different. Heartbreaking stretches of Fontaine’s memoir wrestle with the pain of reconciling past wrongs in the light of present tragedies — of not just failing to say I love you, but not saying anything at all. Fontaine remembers sitting with her mom in the car outside a fancy high school where 13-year old Fontaine was about to interview. “I never had a chance like this, you know,” Fontaine’s mom says. “I let people tell me I wasn’t smart my whole life and I believed them and it almost destroyed me. But you. Go show them. You are very, very special.”
Much of the magnificence of The Electric Woman rests in the realization that almost anything can be made beautiful, at least for a time. Fontaine’s stepfather, who cares for his wife with endless compassion, is another of the miraculous performers in this book, slowly moving Theresa’s motionless and fragile body around the world. Early in the story, he tells Fontaine about a secret spot in Rome he found when he was 19. He bought some dope from a guy in a back alley and stumbled into this garden with broken sculptures. He wants to find that place again and show it to Theresa. Or, while sorting a four-month supply of anticonvulsants, antihypertensive agents, osmotic diuretic, antibiotics, pain management medications, fibers pills, and vitamins, he says, “I just want to see her face, seeing the bridges in Florence.”
As one of Fontaine’s sideshow compatriots tells as she’s just starting: “Don’t worry. Performing the acts is the easy part of making it out here.” It’s not setting yourself on fire or using your body as an enormous electric channel that’s hard. It’s not arriving in Rome or even getting on the boat. It’s getting up each morning and transforming a bleak daily reality into something special. Fontaine and her mother are born performers. So that’s what they do.