By Amanda Smith
On April 5, 2019, Tessa Fontaine created a wild and crowded audience in the William Street Mansion. Tessa Fontaine is an internationally published author who wrote a nonfiction book about her life on the road with America’s last travelling circus and the parallels of fear and horror that her mother faced when becoming paralyzed from massive strokes. On this evening Tessa would be making a quick stop on her national book tour, a year after being apart of the circus.
Her book is titled, “The Electric Woman”. Mrs Fontaine had come to UMW to read a few of her favorite sections of her book. Her first reading was the book’s prologue. When reading this section, Tessa drew in her audience with her with the tone of her voice. At first, her words were playful and humorous while telling the audience that she had googled sideshow acts and lied to her boss about what she could do acts such as fire eating, sword swallowing, and snake charming.
She went on to explain later in her next reading section that she would learn how to one of the things she told her boss she knew how to do, fire eating. When telling this compelling story she said that during the days leading up to her fire eating class she was hoping that fire-eating was just an illusion, that you didn’t really have to put fire into your mouth. After taking the audience through a vivid experience of learning how to smother a fire burning on human legs and arms to the burning, charcoal taste of fire burning her tongue as she put out the flame in her mouth. Tessa suddenly deepened and darken her tone as she placed emphasis on the line “the trick is that there is no trick…you eat fire by eating fire.” I do believe that by saying this she had told the audience the central theme of her book. That she really meant to say, there are no shortcuts or easy streets in life, you just need to go through life and do it. Circulating around this idea, Tessa had introduced the character of her mother and how she went through a series of massive strokes which left her paralyzed, speechless and left her with symptoms of short term memory loss. Her mom would become dependent solely on her and husband, Davey.
Tessa explained that Davey and her mom would set out for a trip to Italy that they have been waiting a long time to do. Tessa had thought the worst, that her mom was taking an extreme risk with her health and that she would facing death right in the face. Which to Tessa had influenced her decision to join the circus. Tessa answered an audience member’s compelling question, “Why the circus? Why not something else?” to where Tessa would explain that she joined the circus because it would be dangerous. Then she would be facing her fears, just like her mom was or as Tessa put it briefly, “I was building intimacy with something that I feared” Another audience member had asked, “how did you deal with your mom?” Tessa replied hesitantly, “It was devastating. Having a wonderful humans body fail and not be able to do what its suppose to takes its toll, especially since you’ve seen the vibrant person they used to be.” Tessa went onto a more light-hearted section of how her co-workers taught her how to swallow a sword and that, just like eating fire, “you just had to untrain your bodies natural instincts to chose and hurl, and just shove a knife down your throat.” as she put it.
I believe her reading highlighted the most important idea of her novel. That you need to go through life with every intention of knowing how dangerous it is, and also learn that you’ll need to endure with some amount of pain along the way. There is no trick to life. But the best way to live through it is to just do it.
