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. When her husband is sent to Iraq, Burana sinks into isolation and despair, indulging morbid thoughts, imagining his funeral and “playing a sick game of Which Would Be Worse?...If he were killed or maimed?” Her husband's safe return and a transfer to West point lead to only more heartache. The author feels smothered. She finds that both she and her husband suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. She becomes suicidal, and they decide to separate. The book is full of interesting observations about West Point life: The Army wives admonish one another to “suck it up,” and compete over their husbands' ranks; no one discusses the war (though Burana's civilian friends, who act as guideposts throughout, talk about little else). Devastated over Abu Ghraib and the ensuing silence at the academy, she e-mails a West Point general, demanding his thoughts. Burana prints his response, including this chilling observation: “From interviews of captured foreign fighters, most said they decided to join the jihad from what happened in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo," Such details elevate this honest and touching personal memoir into a notable historical document.

How does a girl who spent her punky, purple-haired teen years going to anarchist rallies, and her 20s working as an exotic dancer (see acclaimed 2001 memoir Strip City ), manage to transform herself into an acceptable Army wife? In I Love a Man in Uniform , the cataclysmic events of 9/11 throw an already unlikely relationship — new husband Mike is a career military intelligence officer — into sharp relief, and Lily Burana, in engaging but occasionally exhaustive prose (everything you ever wanted to know about the condiment trays at West Point!), unspools her outsider's tale with both brutal honesty and refreshing irreverence. B+

An Officer and a Stripper

I Love a Man in Uniform
By Lily Burana

Although it may sound like a case of opposites attracting -- punky anarchist marries career soldier -- Lily Burana makes clear that she and her husband are really birds of a feather, even if they come from different flocks. When Burana, who made her name with an earlier memoir about working as a stripper, met Mike, an Army officer, she couldn't imagine what they could share, beyond "mutual curiosity." Yet both were smart, funny, driven and idealistic, and, as they grew closer, they found even more in common, including lingering wounds from traumas both military (his) and domestic (hers).

Burana can be hilarious, especially when she skewers the Stepford-style advice once given to Army wives. Upon reading a 1940s book declaring that "Army men like feminine frippery . . . furs, snow-white gloves, and high-heeled slippers," Burana retorts, "But what should I wear?" Still, the book shifts easily into more emotional territory as she navigates loneliness and worry when her husband is deployed to the Middle East. "War is hell and waiting is hell and war is waiting," she writes. Even worse can be the marital aftershocks when soldiers return home. As both these spouses battle their demons, it becomes clear that this Army wife matches her husband in grit and persistence, even if she expresses it with more sass than brass.

-- Kate Tuttle

By the time Burana marries Mike, the punker former stripper has left her Lucite heels (and her anarchistic sympathies) behind. She joins her officer husband at West Point, yet just as she falls in step with this comically regimented world, 9/11 brings the reality of military life into distressingly sharp focus. Burana is ravaged by mixed emotions: her fear for Mike's safety, her fury over Abu Ghraib, and her fierce loyalty to the soldiers. With a skillful blend of humor and poignancy, she provides an intimate look into a misunderstood community. Whether muttering threats about Donald Rumsfeld or teaching burlesque dancing to anxious wives, Burana proves that patriotism comes in all (cup) sizes.

-- Mallory Kass, New York City

Former stripper and East Village punk Burana follows up her hailed Strip City with episodes from her unlikely marriage to a military intelligence officer. The War on Terror, post-traumatic stress disorder, and depression all rear their ugly heads in a work that will no doubt attract other military wives and husbands.

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.)

I LOVE A MAN IN UNIFORM: A Memoir of Love, War and Other Battles

By Lily Burana

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 and understanding 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.