CROSSING BORDERS: A Memoir

In her late teens, Ellis (now an English professor at Rutgers University) left her upper-class Toronto family for New York City's bohemian subculture. She began as a dancer in the heady outer circles of Merce Cunningham and the Living Theater, but finally realized (thanks to some severe anorexic episodes) that she wasn't meant to be a dancer. So she enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Columbia University, amid the turmoilof '68, although her first husband kept her from fully participating in the era's demonstrations. After their divorce, Ellis lived the single mom/academic life, which almost ended when she was attacked at knifepoint in her apartment building's lobby by a pair of black teenagers. She immediately exorcised any tendency to racist response by attending black funerals and volunteering for youth leadership programs. Realizing that "I like to cross boundaries, to go places that people like me are expected to avoid," Ellis ultimately found herself in Nigeria, where she married a young Nigerian woodcarver. There's a lot going on here, and a lot said, too—from wonderment at the advantages of a Nigerian worldview to some oddly juvenile finger-pointing at her frigid, emotionally fearful parents—but not much thinking or analyzing about the bigger questions raised. How can a self-avowed independent feminist say she's marrying to "escape the country of the unloved"? How does she accept a self-denying, male-defined marriage? What does it mean to be so exhilarated by the flaunting of one's otherness at cultural borders? An odor of cultural exhibitionism may bother some readers, but 50-something feminist academics may find this memoir familiar and even engaging. 11 b & w photos. (Dec.)