Memoir manages to be enthralling and appalling

By Wanda Adams
Advertiser Staff Writer

Joelle Fraser's "The Territory of Men" explores the author's life as the child of loving but irresponsible parents and the effects thereof.

"The Territory of Men" is easy to read but hard to take.

Hard to take not because it's poorly written, but because Joelle Fraser is so adept at conveying the essence of her life story that the reader cannot maintain distance. Hers is a troubling life, and this book is troubling, too. Even members of her family have been unable to finish reading it, or had to take it in small bursts.

Fraser, who lives in Portland, Ore., now, considers Hawai'i her heart's home even though she has bounced between the Islands, the Bay Area and the Pacific Northwest over the years.

She recalls in unvarnished detail her childhood as the daughter of an alcoholic writer and a hippie-artsy mother. And she reflects on how that upbringing, and particularly her mother's trail of five marriages and innumerable relationships and alliances, have affected her own ability to negotiate the territory of men.

It is the small scenes that strike the hardest:

• Joelle, at age 3, sent to the neighborhood store for groceries with a list in her pocket that she's too young to read ("wheat bread, peanut butter, milk and Winstons or Marlboros"). "My mother taught me to be independent."
• Joelle, at 4, partying with her mom and their friends in the marina community where they lived, sipping wine from a cup and beer through a straw and taking her tokes of grass just like the rest. "I had no bedtime. I fell asleep on laps and couches and on piles of coats, and sometimes a dog or another kid slept beside me. I was never alone."
• Joelle, at 5, selling her artwork among the flower children on Bridgeway Street, lured into an alleyway by a molester, fondled and then let go. "There is a place inside that I pull into when I need to, a safe place where I hope he can't reach me. I pretend I don't feel his mouth or see his face."

Her mother changes lovers as often as most of us change the oil in our car. Her father, the fallen son of a well-connected family, changes partners less often, but offers no surer a haven — a couch to crash on, a new girlfriend almost as young as Joelle herself, drinks and cigarettes and never enough money or even, sometimes, enough food.

For her mother, it was always the men. For her father, gambling and booze. And neither Fraser nor her brother could compete.

All this ought to be appalling. And it is.

But this book is no crime list and Fraser is no victim. She does not even seem to be particularly angry at her treatment; the only point at which she is overcome by rage is when she hears about someone who enticed her father to drink during the one period in his adult life when he had managed to sober up.

Fraser, it seems, was saved by love. And this book is saved by it, too.

Because Fraser's parents, as irresponsible and self-involved as they seem to have been, loved her and let her know it. Her father — the late Ken Goring, author of "Gone to Maui," a novel that enjoyed considerable celebrity in its day — listened to her stories, gave her writing advice, beamed his pride in her wherever they went. Her mother — happily married now for more than a decade, working in social service and into Native American spirituality — was a fierce defender and encouraged her creativity.

"The Territory of Men" is written as a series of linked essays, in a jumpy context-less style that may leave some readers scrambling. It moves abruptly from Fraser's childhood to teen years, largely skips over her time at the University of Hawai'i and moves on to young adulthood and her own serial relationships with men.

Fraser is unfailingly candid, doesn't attempt to shield anyone in the story from censure, including herself, and displays extraordinary self awareness, so that we're able to peer into her depths and get a surprisingly clear picture of her frame of mind from scene to scene.

Only a piece on her cousin's death at the hands of a violent husband seems shoehorned in and rather intrusive. Fraser, who made a trip to Las Vegas to research the crime, seems to have thought that this incident would explain something to her about men and women, but the insights gained seem trite and not up to Fraser's standard.

The last two chapters, however, are gems.

In "Notes from Maui," she sadly searches her father's book for insight into his character and reproaches herself for never having confronted him on his drinking (get thee to an Al-Anon meeting, my friend).

In "Where Love Is," her mother recalls one of the many times that she betrayed her children's trust for the sake of a man and says, simply, "I'm sorry," something many of us wait a lifetime to hear, and aren't able to believe when we do.

But Fraser forgives her mother, not out of pity but — and this is worse — because she empathizes.

"The same emptiness in her also lives in me," she writes. Still, the reader senses that it's an emptiness that she has learned to live with more comfortably and less self-destructively than her parents did.