Tessa Fontaine can grip a sword in her hand and drive it, against all instinct, toward her face, past her lips, into her mouth, and down her gullet. She can sit, smiling, bantering even, as she awaits volts of electricity that will course through her lithe frame when her co-worker flips a switch. She can survive five months in a cramped van with a group of hustling freaks for roommates as part of the country’s last traveling sideshow, the World of Wonders. But Fontaine won’t be teaching any of these hard-won skills at the Louisiana Book Festival’s WordShop on November 9. Instead she’ll demystify her most elegant trick of all: weaving a rarefied experience into resonant musings on grief, pain, fear, mother-daughter bonds, monstrosity, and intentionally putting yourself in harm’s way in her 2018 full-length debut, The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts.
Experiences—even those involving blades, flying circus stakes, and a carnie jamboree—should be plucked and trimmed for your memoir.
It’s easy to believe you know Fontaine after reading 362 confessional pages of her life in the sideshow compounded with her mother’s agonizing recovery from multiple strokes, but there’s a chasm between Tessa, the character, and Tessa Fontaine, the author who shaped her. (The author eats fire and charms snakes, too, though.) “Every person you write about is a character at the end of the day. It’s impossible to include a whole person in a book,” said Fontaine. Her world in Electric Woman is sketched, but not shallow and never conflated. “The sideshow felt like a collection of people who accepted each other without any conditions. It didn’t matter. There was total acceptance as long as you got your work done.”
Experiences—even those involving blades, flying circus stakes, and a carnie jamboree—should be plucked and trimmed for your memoir, she advises; should you succeed at including an event with the fine detail of reality, the likely outcome is reader boredom. “My exercises tend toward helping writers hone in on specific, critical moments in writing and really making a small moment or small experience that’s very meaningful stand in for the thing you’re summarizing. Juxtaposing different moments together. Stopping time for a few minutes. Diving into particulars to make sense of the more universal truth.”
Fontaine herself knew she’d write about the sideshow from the moment she began following its performers around in Florida and sensed a larger story, but she enlisted with immersion journalism in mind. A hundred pages into her first draft, she changed tacks. “It wasn’t really working,” she said. “My experience out there was so tainted by what was happening in my life and my family. It felt like a partial story. I started including more of my own family story and what was happening to me into the mix. It led to surprising parallels and an exploration of deeper questions.”
If you want to stop time in your own life story, dive in, and see what’s worth enlarging, Fontaine can help. Register for her WordShop, “Close and Bright: A Nonfiction Workshop,” 1 pm–4 pm on November 9 at the Capitol Park Museum. $50. bontempstix.com. The Louisiana Book Festival takes over the Capitol and its grounds on November 10. 9 am–4 pm. louisianabookfestival.org.
