I Love a Man in Uniform: A Memoir of Love, War and Other Battles - Softcover

Burana, Lily

3.57

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9781602861251: I Love a Man in Uniform: A Memoir of Love, War and Other Battles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1602861250 ISBN 13: 9781602861251

Publisher: Weinstein Books, 2010

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In this brave, eloquent, and funny memoir, critically acclaimed author Lily Burana writes about love and self-discovery with an honesty few writers would dare.

A former stripper with a penchant for fishnets and anarchist politics, Lily's lacerating wit and rebellious past never would have suggested a marriage into the military. But then she met Major Mike, a Military Intelligence officer and professor at West Point, and fell hopelessly in love, resulting in a most unorthodox fairytale romance - poignant, sometimes painful, and utterly unpredictable.

After Lily and Mike tied the knot, life as an Army wife proved to be a rough adjustment for authority-averse Lily. When Mike was deployed in the War on Terror, Lily was suddenly left to endure his absence alone, with no friends, no support system, and no knowledge of the vast and confusing military world into which she had married.

Upon Mike's return from the war, the couple moved to historic West Point. With the support of the other military wives, Lily worked through the daily struggle to find her way and came to know and love a group of unlikely friends. Together, Mike and Lily suffered through the nightmare of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, while Lily suffered bouts of depression that nearly ended their marriage. Through it all, Lily struggled with her preconceptions about the military and coped with being married to a good soldier fighting a brutal war.

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About the Author:

LILY BURANA is the author of the acclaimed memoir Strip City and the novel Try. Her writing about the domestic side of military affairs has been published in the New York Times Op-Ed pages and Slate. Other features and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Glamour, Self, The New York Observer, The Village Voice, Slate, Entertainment Weekly, Salon, and many other publications. She has been a Contributing Editor at New York Magazine and SPIN.

From Publishers Weekly:

A former stripper, Burana (Strip City) married a major in the U.S. Army and records, in this heartfelt though long-winded confessional, her attempts to render their two very different worlds compatible. Burana enjoyed a decidedly checkered past, from accidental teenage communist to peep-show girl and stripper in New York and San Francisco (she fondly recalls her Playboy shoot), before meeting Major Mike at a ceremony in a Brooklyn cemetery in 2000. She was attracted by his sense of order and honor, even charmed by his military jargon, while he admired her rebelliousness, though these same qualities would challenge their relationship over time. Living together in a condo near Fort Meade, Fla., where Mike was stationed, segued into a quick marriage (she called herself a War on Terror bride), before he was deployed to Iraq for six months in 2003, creating for her a painful personal trial of waiting and self-discipline. Their move to West Point underscored her new role as military wife, and she embarked on a gloomy, unstable period of psychological turmoil requiring therapy and medication for her own brand of post-traumatic stress disorder. Marriage counseling worked for them, bucking the high divorce rate within the armed forces, and Burana concludes her memoir on a positive note, having made peace with the army's fallibility and found her own place in it. (Apr.)
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