Fontaine’s memoir is astounding, amazing, inspiring and a little bit terrifying ... 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 ... 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.
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 ... 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 ... 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 ... The quiet beauty of this book lies in its ordinary, enigmatic human feats of interpersonal connection.
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.
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 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 ... Trying to understand what has happened to her mother’s body and mind, Fontaine challenges her own.
The circus proves both a disorienting, distracting balm, but as exciting as the snake handling, card tricks, and 'secret rituals' of the carnival’s insides are, it is the grinding journey of mom-grief that will resonate with readers ... There are plenty of memoirs out there, but take a walk on the wild side, why dontcha?
In weaving these stories together, Fontaine creates a binary between her body and her mother's body: Fontaine works to relearn the body's instincts and the pain of sword swallowing or fire eating, alongside her mother's struggles to learn new kinds of mobility after the stroke that left her unable to speak or walk. The explicit documenting of these travails of body and mind are, in fact, difficult reading due to the visceral responses inspired by Fontaine's descriptions ... Fontaine is so straighforward and forthcoming at the book's end I feel that I have already received a steady stream of postcards from her.
This remarkable, beautifully written memoir explores the depth of mother-daughter love and the courageous acts of overcoming fear and accepting change.
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 ... 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.
