I Love a Man in Uniform: A Memoir of Love, War, and Other Battles by Lily Burana

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In Strip City, talented journalist Lily Burana bid farewell to her career as a fantasy dancer by taking a coast-to-coast journey through the go-go bars of America. In I Love a Man in Uniform, she stays much closer to home but returns with a story no less exotic. The former punk-rock stripper describes how she fell hopelessly, inexplicably in love with Major Mike, a West Point professor and understandably closed-mouth military intelligence officer. The story really begins when Mike is assigned to combat duty in the Middle East while Lily sits stranded at home, rudderless in an essentially alien world. Mike returns with post traumatic stress disorder, adding to the challenges confronted this incongruous couple. This memoir captures the poignancy of a great love suffering from battles half a world away.

From the Publisher

An all-American love story about a former punk-rock stripper and her unlikely marriage to an officer in the U.S. Army.

In this brave, eloquent, and often funny memoir, critically acclaimed author Lily Burana writes about love, war, and the realities of military marriage with an honesty few writers would dare.

A former exotic dancer who once had a penchant for anarchist politics and purple hair dye, Lily's rebellious past never would have suggested a marriage into the military. But then she met Mike, a Military Intelligence officer, and fell hopelessly in love, resulting in a most unorthodox romance-poignant, passionate, and utterly unpredictable.

After Lily and Mike said "I do" in a brief, pre-deployment City Hall ceremony, Mike left for Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Lily was left in a strange town to endure his absence alone, with no support system and little 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, where Lily found that life on base had its own challenges. As the war continued and the past intruded unexpectedly into the present, Lily and Mike found themselves plunged into the nightmare of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Struggling to cope in a community where admitting weakness is the ultimate tabooand "suck it up" is the suggested response to emotional pain, Lily suffered from depression so severe, it almost ended their marriage. With the help of a revolutionary therapeutic technique, the couple made their way out of the darkness and back to each other. Through it all, Lily wrangled with her preconceptions about the military and found herplace within the uniquely supportive sisterhood of military wives.

From harrowing emotion to the dishy details of life on base, Lily Burana bares her heart and soul as a modern military spouse. I Love a Man in Uniform is a profoundly moving story of how a woman can locate, and heal, her true self as a dedicated Army wife, free spirit, and freedom-loving American.

The Washington Post - Kate Tuttle

Burana can be hilarious…Still, the book shifts easily into more emotional territory as she navigates loneliness and worry when her husband is deployed to the Middle East.

The New York Times - J. Courtney Sullivan

The premise sounds like fodder for a Diablo Cody screenplay: A sassy former stripper and anarchist with a penchant for pop-culture references falls in love with a strait-laced soldier and becomes an Army wife. What follows is a humorous, moving and surprising account of married life in today's military.

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.)

Kirkus Reviews

A journalist and ex-stripper marries a career Army officer..After a chance meeting and whirlwind romance, Burana (Try, 2006, etc.) married Mike, a major in the U.S. Army. Though they were an odd couple—a former exotic dancer who wrote a bestselling book about her adventures (Strip City, 2001) and an all-American hero who devoted his life to the military—Burana willingly joined the sisterhood of women whose husbands serve their country in uniform. She learned what this meant when Mike was deployed to the Middle East as the Iraq War began. She coped with the fear and loneliness that accompany having a loved one in harm's way. She was awed, and intimidated, by the way other military wives kept home and hearth together. She was confused when Mike returned from duty different. On to West Point, whose arcane rituals and rules, both written and unwritten, Burana describes in hilarious detail. Despite her unorthodox—and what she feared some would see as sordid—past, she found peace among the soldiers and spouses of West Point. Until, following her father's death, depression hit her like a guided missile. Then the marriage that had sustained her began to suffocate her; the life of an Army spouse that had challenged and bemused, now terrified; and all she wanted was a way out. She left Mike and embarked on a battle to understand the posttraumatic stress that afflicted her and the memories of childhood abuse at the hands of a babysitter that haunted her. Mike learned he could not fix Burana, as was his Army can-do inclination, but could only love her. After many struggles, achingly delineated in beautiful prose, they reconciled and resumed their life at the Academy. Moved by the kindness andunderstanding other Army wives showed her, Burana determined to repay their kindness. How she did so was appropriately outrageous—and too funny an ending to give away..One of those rare memoirs that both teach and make us laugh..Author tour to New York, Washington, D.C., Denver, Colorado Springs, Portland, Ore., Seattle. Agent: Tina Bennett/Janklow & Nesbit.

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