Child No More: A Memoir

In the early 1970s -- between the dawn of the sexual revolution and the disillusionment of Watergate -- a young Dutch woman named Xaviera de Vries was transformed overnight into an international celebrity and sex symbol as the author of The Happy Hooker, her racy chronicle of life as a high-class New York madam. As Xaviera Hollander, she became the voice of that era's new sexual freedoms even as her book was banned and she herself was deported to Amsterdam in the wake of the scandal.

Yet sexual escapades have formed only a small part of this woman's remarkable life story -- a story she reveals for the first time in this thoughtful and involving memoir.

It was a life begun in terror. Two months after her birth, Hollander and her mother were confined in a women's prison camp during the WWII Japanese occupation of Indonesia; her father, a doctor, was imprisoned nearby. By some miracle, the small family survived; yet the horrors of their treatment -- and the precious nature of their bond -- were imprinted forever on her psyche.From her childhood forward, Hollander traces her life, and sexuality, as it was shaped by the example of her parents: her father, a dapper and witty Jewish psychologist and intellectual, her mother, the gorgeous daughter of conventional German parents. With characteristic frankness, Hollander revisits how her parents' tempestuous marriage shaped the course of her own life. And as she chronicles her eventual departure for New York, her passionate affairs with men and women, and her years of international celebrity, she reveals how her parents' lives continued to entwine with her own -- the romantic ideal of her father coloring her relationships with men, her jealousy of her mother settling at last into a warm and abiding love.

Told in the utterly honest and unquenchably inquisitive voice that has always distinguished her, Xaviera Hollander's Child No More recounts a surprising and ultimately uplifting voyage of discovery through three lives.