Many of us are lucky enough to spend a small percentage of our days on this planet presiding over death. When the inevitable arrives and we must accompany a loved one up until we can follow them no further, the experience short-circuits our capacity to believe that there ever has been—ever will be again—a succession of days and months and years free from the immediacy of this pain. Often there is a seemingly impossible tension between grief and boredom, long days and nights in which the imminent moment fails to arrive. The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts by Tessa Fontaine relates the years following a massive stroke suffered by the author's mother, and it is with sympathy and amazement that we watch the author so successfully translate to the page those emotions that feel personal, impossible, and ineffable when we're in the middle of them. "Human fucking history,'" the author attempts to normalize the stress of tragedy to herself, "''This is the normal cycle of human history.'"
     Fontaine's decision to join America's last travelling sideshow, the World of Wonders, and document her attempts to prove herself a valuable member of the crew, to rise from "bally girl" to one of the real moneymaking performers of the eponymous electric chair act, provides a way for her to pay tribute to her adventuresome mother but also becomes a source of guilt. Despite the very long workdays, she constantly struggles with the idea that she might be running away from the duty of remaining by her mother's side, using the sideshow as a distraction (though her tenure with World of Wonders overlaps with a bold trip to Italy planned by her mother and step-father despite, or in defiance of, her mother's medical needs).
     One of the memoir's many marvels is the testament it provides to our species's ability to make nearly any situation habitable, any routine habitual. However, Fontaine knows that there is a double-edged nature to this capacity. On the one hand, it helps inure the speaker to the stress of caring for her mother, the hours and hours spent in hospitals and the doctors' constant warnings that now might be the time, just as it later helps her make a home out of a cramped and overheated living space in the sideshow's semi-trailer, helps her roll with the performance anxiety of learning strange new sideshow acts, helps her survive the lifestyle's financial stress and lack of creature comforts. On the other hand, we realize that she didn't join the sideshow for the purpose of getting accustomed to things, and even though her surroundings provide continuous surprises, she keeps having to remind herself to remain present, not to—through distraction or the numbness of performing the same acts over and over—miss out on the very adventure of which she is a part.
     One five-page section finds Fontaine answering her step-dad's question, "'What are your days like?'" with a truncated "'We get up, and perform all day, and then go to bed... It's fun.'" What follows is a virtuosic summary of the average day's itinerary, including "Escape from handcuffs" or "Light up your torches and eat fire" every five to ten minutes from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m., a perfect way to help readers comprehend the sideshow's impossible coexistence of risk and tedium. The itinerary ends with a passage, one of my favorites in the whole book, that will resonate with any reader who has worked such long days:

You won't even be able to believe the idea that you'll have to do it all again. And you will wake up and swear that tonight, this night, you will go to bed right when the show is over, get a long sleep, "catch up," as they say, but when the last act is over and the banners are wrapped that night, your body will be buzzing with the adrenaline of performing, with the exhaustion mixed in, but more than that you brain will be awash in relief for having finished the day and you will forget how tired you are, will feel this overwhelming need to have a little downtime, just a little while to unwind and talk to people other than the audience, and so you will.

     The central theme of Fontaine's PhD studies at the University of Utah is monstrosity, and The Electric Woman is interspersed with research about the history of public fascination with sideshow acts. She educates readers on the differences between "freaks," "those who were born with, or who through accident or illness acquired, a nonnormative body," and a "geek," "a person who, from a wider range of options, chose to manipulate his body to make it nonnormative." Ironically, while sideshows once provided freaks with one of the only ways they could financially support themselves, the increasing pressures of political correctness have made the public more squeamish about paying to gawk at such spectacles. A passage about Martin Couney, a man who in the early part of the twentieth century funded the care of thousands of premature babies by charging the public to view the tiny patients in incubators of his own construction, bears witness to how such exhibits could not only become a type of home for those who would otherwise have trouble finding one, but also how they could save lives.
     The most stunning aspect of The Electric Woman is its treatment of time. Sven Birkerts in The Art of Time in Memoir, outlines a variety of ways that skilled memoirists avoid the tedium of straight chronology by stepping back and noticing the associative patterns that begin to form between events separated by years. "The best default seemed to be a work comprising of at least two time lines—present and past," he sets out the basic approach that Fontaine, with significant improvisation, will follow. "The now and the then (the many thens), for it is the juxtaposition of the two—in whatever configuration—that creates the quasi-spatial illusion most approximating the sensations of lived experience, of recollection merging into the ongoing business of living." There are indeed many thens that find resonance in the now of Fontaine's 150 days at the World of Wonders in 2013: her mother's childhood friendship with Davy, who would later become the author’s step-father, surfing stunts her mother performed as a young woman, the difficult divorce of Fontaine’s parents, her mother’s attempts to get her into a fancy school that was above their family’s means, unkind words Fontaine spoke to her mother as a teenager that she regrets not being able to take back, the stroke and its years of aftermath, the nerves surrounding the couple's trip to Italy, and so much more. The speed of the intercutting varies depending on the exigency of the situation and the impact of the resonance between events, for example Fontaine’s first time in the Headless Woman act juxtaposed with a tender, painful scene in which the author lies down beside her damaged mother.
     Fontaine also knows the moment she shouldn’t try to orchestrate this delicate trick, when she as a writer should reproduce the messy shock she felt as a performer, the impossible confluence of all the thens with the most unsuspectedly loaded now, the moment when the World of Wonder's greatest trick is the serendipity of life itself, a spectacular chapter appropriately titled "The Great Reveal," which I wouldn’t dare spoil. It’s all waiting for you, just inside the tent.