Product Description

They were young, brilliant, and bold. They set out to conquer the world. But the world had other plans for them.


Bestselling author Susan Jane Gilman's new memoir is a hilarious and harrowing journey, a modern heart of darkness filled with Communist operatives, backpackers, and pancakes.


In 1986, fresh out of college, Gilman and her friend Claire yearned to do something daring and original that did not involve getting a job. Inspired by a place mat at the International House of Pancakes, they decided to embark on an ambitious trip around the globe, starting in the People's Republic of China. At that point, China had been open to independent travelers for roughly ten minutes.


Armed only with the collected works of Nietzsche, an astrological love guide, and an arsenal of bravado, the two friends plunged into the dusty streets of Shanghai. Unsurprisingly, they quickly found themselves in over their heads. As they ventured off the map deep into Chinese territory, they were stripped of everything familiar and forced to confront their limitations amid culture shock and government surveillance. What began as a journey full of humor, eroticism, and enlightenment grew increasingly sinister-becoming a real-life international thriller that transformed them forever.


Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven is a flat-out page-turner, an astonishing true story of hubris and redemption told with Gilman's trademark compassion, lyricism, and wit.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18052 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00" h x 6.22" w x 9.40" l, 1.16 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780446578929
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, March 2009: While this latest memoir from Susan Jane Gilman (former Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress) appears to be a saucy account of international sexcapades, it quickly reveals its whip-smarts, sucking you into a story that brilliantly captures the "ecstatic terror" of gleefully leaping from your comfort zone--and finding yourself in freefall. It's 1986, and newly minted ivy league grads Susy and her friend Claire have never left the U.S. when (inspired by a "Pancakes of Many Nations" promotion during a drunken night at IHOP) they hatch a plan to circle the world, starting in China, which has just opened to tourists. From the moment of arrival, they're out of their depth, perpetually hungry, foolish, and paranoid from relentless observation. Claire, who carries the complete works of Nietzsche "like a Gideon Bible," seems more capable than Susy until encounters with military police, hallucinatory fevers, and a frantic escape from a squalid hospital expose cracks in her psyche that utterly derail their plans. Rich with insight, dead-on dialogue, and canny characterization, Gilman's personal tale nails that cataclysmic collision of idealism and reality that so often characterizes young adulthood. Be prepared to wolf down the final hundred pages in one sitting. --Mari Malcolm

Review
'An ambitious and intimate coming-of-age novel' - KIRKUS REVIEW

Review
"Gilman proves an able and entertaining storyteller. Though there is more about China in the unabridged print version, the abridgement does keep her account flowing quickly. There is also an informative Q&A with the author at the end." (The Boston Globe )

Customer Reviews

A slow fuse on a big powder keg
I almost stopped reading this book after the first couple of chapters. Boy, am I glad I kept going! Susan Jane Gilman has written a memoir that begins in deceptively languid fashion but ends in an explosion of surreal and shocking events.

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven starts off very slowly. If you're not paying close attention to what's going on, as I was not, the book seems like yet another "clueless recent college graduate with backpack" travel journal. Even the book's title is somewhat misleading; it made me expect a cobbled together collection of exaggerated, drunken adventures in developing countries.

I was wrong, very wrong.

Small, seemingly insignificant, things begin happening to Gilman and her traveling partner. As patterns emerge, the story begins to take on threatening, even malevolent, overtones and the pace quickens. What began as two innocent and idealistic girls taking an around-the-world trip turns into an uncontrolled descent into chaos, fear, and personal destruction.

Sure, this all sounds like a plot for a bad Roger Corman horror movie--especially that last bit!--but Gilman manages to make everything unfold in a mesmerizing yet believable manner. She writes in an engaging, flowing style that truly brings the story to life. Gilman's experience as a journalist has given her a talent for capturing key details of people and places, so that even the parts of the book that may have been embellished don't feel out of place or totally implausible.

The story also benefits from twenty years of hindsight. Gilman occasionally breaks away from the main narrative to comment on the things she thought and did at the time of the story, when she was twenty-one. In these asides, Gilman deftly skewers a lot of the self-serving beliefs held by the backpack-youth hostel-railpass crowd both then and now.

Bottom line: Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven starts out slowly but rapidly gains momentum as the author begins to realize that she has lit the fuse on a gigantic powder keg. When the big explosion finally happens, you won't be able to stop reading. Four stars.

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And now, some books I was reminded of by this book:
WARNING: this link is a possible spoiler
Bad Trips
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

Ironically, noirishly satisfying!
What happens when two recent female college graduates decide to circumnavigate the world on a shoestring in 1986, starting in the tourism-challenged People's Republic of China? Let's just say that "Innocents Abroad" doesn't begin to describe it.

Gilman and her pseudonymous companion, Claire, are arm's-length friends when they embark on the adventure of a lifetime, inspired by the map on an IHOP place mat. At some point in our lives, each of has probably pursued a brash dream with someone we hardly knew, but in Gilman and Claire's case, the consequences surpass anything they and their apprehensive families could have imagined. Beyond their naivete and the sheer foreignness of the environment the two young women plunge into, at 21, Gilman increasingly finds herself forced to deal with her friend's rapid descent into psychosis (which, she points out in the afterword, may have been the product of antimalarial medication). Along the way, she encounters some unforgettable characters: a generous, English-speaking Chinese man who befriends them in the hope that they will help him defect; a clueless, lumbering German misfit; a free-spirited American mother and her two rambunctious sons; a Chinese waitress who prepares Western food for homesick backpackers; a German hunk whose kindness matches his considerable romantic appeal; and a Canadian nurse who rallies to her aid at her time of greatest need.

As compelling as the people she meets is her take on the country itself. The picture she paints of 1980s post-Kissinger China is rich and textured, frequently rendered with delicious irony and dark humor. The bravado with which she handles various encounters with Chinese culture, cuisine and government authorities is both unnerving and astonishing. (Her description of a rural hospital should be an eye-opener for anyone who hasn't traveled in the Third World.)

Part travelogue, part coming-of-age story, part memoir, this book is at once entertaining, revealing and insightful. As China's well-documented rise to industrial superpower inspires headlines (and dominates the U.S. national debt), this delightful, if occasional discomfiting book provides a vivid reminder of how far our largest creditor has come...and how impetuous, reckless and ultimately resourceful young people in dire circumstances can be.

Hilarious and heartbreaking memoir
Two well-educated, intelligent young women decide in a moment of naivete and foolishness to travel to China together in the 1980s. They struggle in the communist country with language, food, hygiene, and other things we take for granted in the United States.

The author's friend at first seems a bit kooky but gradually becomes totally separated from reality. In other words, she loses her mind and becomes a danger to herself and others. The goal then becomes how to get her friend back to United States before anything too terrible can happen to her.

Although this sounds grim and depressing, Gilman has written it in the style of Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. It is at times hysterically funny, and I often read passages out loud so my partner could understand why I was laughing.

This is a wonderful book that proves that most people are decent and sweet. I can absolutely see it being made into a film.