No Man’s Land: A Memoir

Welsh-born, Cambridge-educated Fowler takes a cynical tone as she recreates her dizzying descent into New York’s demimonde as a strip-club dancer. Assuming an alter ego she calls Mimi, a “parasitical spirit,” the author at age 26 arrived in New York to fill a void after graduating from Cambridge, then spent three years traveling around the world and working on boats as a chef. Back in Manhattan, she soon became one of the nameless crowd of undocumented workers, though white and educated, unable to secure paid work in her field of journalism and finally landing a job as a waitress at a midtown strip joint, Foxy’s. But dancing was where the big money was, especially luring customers into the private Champagne Room, and, as Mimi, she proved a canny, quick learner of the booze-and-drugs grind as well as a loyal sounding board to the other girls of varying nationalities. Despite her self-imposed rules of no kissing and “I don’t do boyfriends,” she fell tenderly for a fellow high-brow Englishman she named Eton, who offered to help pay for her visa application. In the end, Fowler’s writing is self-conscious, though the disaffected female voices that haunt this work throughout are raw and angry. (June)