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In A Ticket to the Circus Norris Church Mailer converts the skeptic to a friend:  when it ends we feel that we'll miss a close companion who shared with US starkly honest stories of a life packed with folly, humor, eccentricity, and human dignity.

Born Barbara Jean Davis, the only daughter of Arkansas Baptists, Barbara grew up to be a high school art teacher and by her mid-twenties, she was a single mom, divorced from a Vietnam vet. She meets Norman Mailer while he was visiting a local college. Apart from cultural differences, (Mailer was from Jewish Brooklyn) also between them were twenty six years and  five women (mothers of his 7 children.)   The two embarked on a relationship that lasted—not easily—till Mailer’s death 30 years later.

Barbara Jean Davis becomes Norris Church Mailer.  As Norris she introduces the reader to the family: her parents, each of the seven stepchildren, their mothers, her own two sons, and Norman’s mom.  The portraits are brief but fond sketches of each and they reveal Norris’ capacity to befriend the unlikely and to see the good in people.  Even the last girlfriend’s mother is brought into the fold. Photos interspersed along the way fill out the picture of a family Norris nurtured and helped to unite. 

The most complex portrait is-not unexpectedly-that of Norman Mailer:  On the one hand he was a thoughtful observer of the absurdities of the twentieth century and a hard-working and talented writer.  In his personal life, he was also a proud and loving family man who encouraged his wife’s ambitions to paint, model, act and write.   On the other side Mailer was a vain and arrogant man who raged, cheated on Norris, and seemed to relish televised enmities and debates with feminists and notables like Gore Vidal.

As for herself, Norris presents the glamorous side—there are photos of her modeling career including lounging naked on a red fox fur—but the majority of the book is filled with the more ordinary in her life. She acknowledges the guilt of months spent away from her young son, the folly of her attempts to act, her own affairs, the hardship of bearing witness to her parents’ aging and dying process, followed by the painful path she traveled with her husband as he traveled that same road.  This followed by her own cancer.

It’s important in sharing with a friend a willingness to be silly.  Norris doesn’t shy from that: During her actress want-to-be phase, as she’s about to shoot a commercial, she’s outfitted with long fake fingernails:  “I tried to pick my nose and nearly slit my throat…I had small nicks where I’d tried to scratch in my sleep, and it is a miracle I didn’t put my eye out.”   Who hasn’t been faced with the folly of one’s own attempts to be someone she isn't ?

As for the “circus” in the book title, the life this book bears witness to is a whirlwind:  with glimpses of Bill Clinton, Jackie O, Ted Kennedy, Woody Allen, Oscar de la Renta, Bob Dylan and Fidel Castro.  With homes in Brooklyn Heights and Provincetown, life with Mailer also meant time spent in Bar Harbor and Stockbridge and trips to Mexico, Cuba, Russia, Vietnam.  In the pages on the trip to Manila the leader is literally ringside at the Ali-Frazier fight:

Testosterone glowed in the air like phosphorus, and the smell of sweaty bodies

was at a level I could just about tolerate without fainting.  The crowd parted, and four men came in carrying a…well, a throne is what it was, a big gold chair that sat up higher than everyone else’s.  Behind the chair, in a procession, was President Marcos surrounded by a phalanx of bodyguards, walking in formation. 

At one point in Mailer’s life, he befriended an incarcerated man named, Jack Abbott.  Once released, Abbott arrived uninvited at the Brooklyn apartment yet with Mailer's approval, insinuated himself into the family.  The misadventure of living with an ex-con provides dramatic tension and yields sympathy and admiration for how Norris handled the whole fraught situation.  

A Ticket to the Circus is a candid account of a woman, warts and all, who sees the best in others, allows us to see the best in her, and maybe even to feel that we've added a friend to our world. Unexpectedly we come to see Norris as a friend.  There are times when she seems to enjoy not only her own sexy persona but when she too easily accepts a servile role.  And we can do without the make-up tips: (mix it with your moisturizer.) But then that is exactly what is good about the memoir:  it’s a candid account of a woman, warts and all, who sees the best in others, allows us to see the best in her, and to feel that we've added a friend to our world.

Women in two cultures: Persian Girls & Unto the Daughters (a Sicilian-American story)

Two memoirs, Nahid Rachlin Persian Girls (2006) and Karen Tintori's Unto the Daughters (2007) each focuses on belief in a tragic concept: the inferiority of women to men. Coincidentally alienated from their respective origins both authors ultimately rejected their backgrounds and married Jews. Sicilian American Tintori also converted, while Iranian born Rachlin just let her initially weak ties to Islam dissolve.

Of course, Iranian attitudes about women differ significantly from Sicilian ones. It's important too to note that Tinturi's story concerns events that took place in 1920 whereas Rachlin's recounts her childhood and early adulthood in the immediate post-World War II era.

The roots of some of the attitudes Rachlin describes in Persian Girls are linked to Islam's origin in Arabia where female infanticide was not uncommon at the time; birth of a girl was a matter of shame and dishonor to a man. Of course this attitude changed in time, but in varying degrees. In radical Islam, it is still going strong.

Rachlin's is one of a number of recent Iranian women's memoirs to describe and denounce the extreme paternalism and discrimination against women carried out under the guise of protecting them. Her mother who had given birth to eight children (four of whom survived to adulthood) gave Rachlin away to her childless and widowed sister, a loving woman. Nine years later the author's father whom, as a child, she had only seen once, kidnapped her from her schoolyard and returned the child to a mother who did not love her.

The heart of Persian Girls lies in the description of Iranian social repression, as represented by Rachlin's father's extreme male chauvinism (even though in the Iranian context he was a social moderate.) The repression which forces Rachlin to abandon society includes rigid censorship laws and the burdensome requirements that women wear burqas and that girls as young as nine accept forced marriages to men often much older than themselves.

Rachlin also bares her soul regarding her love for two people, the aunt who initially raised her, and her sister Pari, whose dream of becoming an actress paralleled Rachlin determination to become a writer. But not only did Pari fail to achieve her dream but he also experienced great tragedy.

Rachlin left Iran for good to initially attend an American College in the Midwest. Ironically having escaped terrible social repression in Iran, in the US she quickly encountered typical American ethnocentrism.  Thus, the mother of a classmate told her, "you're so much more refined and other foreigners."

The root of Tintori's story lies in a Sicily where attitudes about women are influenced both by the traditional contradictory status that the Catholic Church accords women – holy- and inferior, and by the centuries old Sicilian, violence laden view of honor. ("Besides health, honor is our biggest prize. . ." Tintori's great-grandfather tells his family at a crucial moment in the story, "it is a man's duty to avenge offended honor, commanded by God."

Tintori's absorbing and well researched book centers around a family secret that she unravels: the honor killing by family members of her maternal grandmother's sister. The murder is rooted in the Sicilian concept of honor which the author partly explains by taking the reader back to Sicily in times past. But it is also explained by the pathology of a particular family. We find out that in addition to the honor killing, one man in the family has pushed his wife down the stairs.

The head of Tintori's maternal grandmother's family, Domenico Costa, is a womanizer who hates women and does not even allow his wife to eat out of her own plate. Instead she must eat out of his and even share his taste and how much salt to put on the food.

In one horrid scene, just before one daughter is to be married, she steps over a rigid line her father has drawn. A fiancé cannot even hand a spoon to her betrothed-let alone touch him. But forgetting herself, as the young man is leaving her parents house, she hands him a hat he has almost forgotten. " Putana!" (Whore), her father screams. "This engagement is canceled." And within minutes he is beating her with their dog' s long, metal leash. Although the Costa family was typical only in the extreme, and illustrating the concept of so-called honor.

Tintori has expertly integrated an account of how she uncovered the family secret, with the main story itself. Unto the Daughters, her book, and Persian Girls are two well-written books which reveal much of the darker side of women's experience in societies that fail to sufficiently recognize their humanity.

MAKING BABIES

Three Wishes

Carey Goldberg, Be...

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"Happy Birthday Sweetie. How are you?" a parent tells his/her daughter who has just turned thirty something. Daughter responds with "I want to have a baby." It's a common scenario. Behind the young woman's statement is the ticking of her biological clock. Like millions of other young women in their 30s in postindustrial America, including the three authors of Three Wishes, she has put career on the front burner, ahead of marriage and motherhood. But like Pam Ferdinand, one of the three authors of Three Wishes, they all share some version of Ferdinand's dream in her early 20s: "I had imagined myself in the future as a married mother with five children living on a farm in Vermont."

Journalists Carey Goldberg, Beth Jones and Ferdinand (GJF) have written a revealing and well integrated account of their respective journeys from being single successful professionals to married successful mothers -- and professionals. Along the way to their longed for destinations, they had to navigate a bunch of difficult shoals -- including kissing a bunch of frogs (if I may mix my metaphors).

Author Goldberg decided to try IVF at age 39 after she broke up with a cheating boyfriend. Sometime after she successfully convinced a new one to become a father to a child, they broke up, she had the baby and then became involved with a third somewhat older fellow who said about Goldberg's daughter, "I don't love her yet, but I'm sure I will love her. That relationship too collapsed.

Jones conceived with her husband who reacted to the news of her pregnancy by saying, "This isn't the most convenient time," Then she miscarried, divorced and had an unplanned pregnancy with a boyfriend (who had a track record of numerous short-term relationships). "We'll figure this out," he said when she told him she was pregnant. "You just have to give me a little time." Then came a phone call from a genetic counselor, "I have your amnio results. . . . Beth, I'm sorry," and she aborted a Down Syndrome fetus. At one point, Goldberg gave her a vial of sperm that Goldberg had received from a sperm bank (which in the end neither of them needed.) The story goes on from there.

Ferdinand too took a while before she reached the promised land. For a while she was busy with a creep who described some vacation plans at one point, "come over with me and spend the first five days there. Then the guys [will] come [and you'll go home.] She too received the magic vial which in turn -- well, read the book.

In addition to the above problems, GJF also experience the threat of infertility and fear of familial rejection if they chose to use IVF.

One of several delightful features of Three Wishes is that it has some of the attributes of a mystery. The reader quickly becomes involved in their lives and determination to become pregnant. But this time the mystery is not who done it -- but who (as in which guy) will it ("it" as in get the woman pregnant)? And who will stick around?

For many women in GJF's predicament the ending is not a happy one. Many don't or can't take the chance of becoming single mothers. But for GJF themselves, it all works out in the end: children and husbands/fathers. Did I give away the ending? Don't worry. The book's mystery is in the process much more than in the ending(s).

Three Wishes inspires the reader to empathize with the authors' quest for parenthood and even cheer them on. One more thing -- although it might sound like a "woman's book," its scope is too big and too compelling for such narrow categorization. The book deserves a broad readership.

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THE LAST RESORT

The Last Resort

Douglas Rogers

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Has author Douglas Rogers increased the dangers facing his parents from Zimbabwe's Mugabe regime by writing about them in his compelling and remarkable book, The Last Resort? Given Rogers obvious intelligence, street smarts and first-hand familiarity with their situation, probably not. More likely the fame he has probably given them acts as a protective shield around the brave couple.

On one level, the subject of The Last Resort is Rogers's family. But the author, ordinarily a travel writer, has written one of those fascinating memoirs that tell a broad story that goes beyond what it looks like at first. Want to better understand what's going on in crazy Pres. Robert Mugabe was Zimbabwe, read Roger's book.

In many ways, the Rogers family symbolizes the experience of a large number of white farmers whose families settled long ago in the former Rhodesia. Despite how the repressive regime portrays its policy of appropriating white owned farms as land reform, that is not at all what it is. It's theft pure and simple which is not even benefiting the poor people. It is not at all simply a matter of white versus black. Most of the victims of Mugabe's repressive policies are black Africans who support his political opposition. True the Rogers were born into privilege, but they long ago accepted and perhaps even embraced black African rule.

When Mugabe first began his crackdown on Zimbabwe's white farmers, Rogers called his parents from the UK where he was then living.

"What's going on?" He asked his mother when she picked up the phone.

"Oh it's terrible, terrible!"

"What's happened?" He asked, his heart in his mouth.

"They lost."

"Who lost?"

"Why the cricket team."

It wasn't that Rogers' mother was unaware of what was going on. But she kept her perspective. As it happened, initially the Rogers got a pass from the appropriation policy; they own a resort, not a farm. But that didn't stop gangs of young toughs from riding up to their front door waving weapons in the air. In addition, through entirely extralegal manipulation, at one point Rogers' father finds out that his lost legal title to his land. But still they hang on.

Gradually, the Rogers' resort, having lost its tourist customers, metamorphized with part of it serving as a haven initially for white Zimbabweans who were forced off their land and part of it as a bar which attracted people from the nearest city. In addition, for part of the time some of the land was sublet by a man who ran what amounted to a bordello.

Along with plenty of scenes of high tension, Rogers provides a number of comic scenes in a gripping writing style that deserves a wide readership.