Circus life, ill mom at core of memoir

three years taking care of her — 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 bit terrifying. It’s both the story of a mother and daughter’s complicated relationship and a coming-of-age story of sorts.

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 a memoir, and Fontaine’s is just right: trustworthy, intimate and thoughtful.

She mulls her mother’s illness; she mulls her mother’s betrayal; she acknowledges being terrified of snakes, having wept in fear the first time she held one. She’s disappointed to find that there is no trick to eating fire, no mirrors.

“You eat fire,” she writes, • “The Electric Woman” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 366 pages, $27) by Tessa Fontaine

“by eating fire.” And if that’s not a metaphor for getting through life, well, what is?

Fontaine has a great eye for detail. She depicts the other circus performers with true 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, too, at points in between.

Fontaine’s circus adventures are nicely juxtaposed against her mother’s long recovery, with both women learning to overcome their fears and to meet life’s challenges.

Fontaine’s mother learns not only to communicate again and how to eat, but also 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 escpae from handcuffs; how to open her mouth and swallow a flaming torch as if it were life itself.