Child No More: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Xaviera Hollander (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 4, 2002

In the bestselling The Happy Hooker and subsequent books, XavieraHollander became famous for her unforgettably candid and racy stories of life as a New York madam catering to a sophisticated international clientele during the 1960s and 70s. Yet this remarkable woman's sexual escapades form only a part of her own remarkable life story - a story she reveals for the first time in the pages of this literary memoir, Child No More. It was a life begun in terror: Two months after her birth, young Xaviera de Vries and her mother were confined in a prison camp during the WWII Japanese occupation of Indonesia; her father, a doctor, was imprisoned in another camp. Two years later, summoned to treat a sick child, he operated on his own daughter without realising her identity. But that story is just the start of an extraordinary memoir in which she traces her own life - and sexuality - as it was influenced 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, and a target of Nazi emnity for her association with a Jew. With breathtaking -but entirely characteristic - frankness, Xaviera revisits how her parents' own tempestuous relationship (and her father's licentious lifestyle) shaped her own life story. As she chronicles her eventual departure for New York, her entree into the world of prostitution, and her years of international celebrity, she reveals for the first time how her parents' lives continued to entwine with her own, as she endured years of separation from her father, and even stood by her mother as she entered a fulfilling lesbian relationship in the last years of her life. Told in the utterly frank and unquenchably inquisitive voice that marks all her work - yet from an entirely new and ultimately more honest perspective - Child No More recounts a surprising and ultimately uplifting "voyage of discovery through three lives."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In chatty, colloquial style, Penthouse columnist and 1970s cult heroine Hollander (The Happy Hooker) details the nonhooker events of her life. The memoir begins and ends with the death of her mother, Germaine, and focuses on her relationship with her parents. The only child of a volatile and sensual couple (her father, Mick De Vries, was a Jewish-Dutch-Indonesian physician and Germaine was a German-French model 15 years younger), Hollander was infatuated with her father and jealous of her mother, yet loved both passionately. This family triangle defined Hollander's life, as did the harrowing experience of being interred by the Japanese in Indonesia during WWII, where all three of them were tortured and nearly killed. Readers expecting a juicy sexual tell-all will likely be disappointed. Hollander details a series of romances, including current lovers Romke (a man 25 years her junior) and Dia (a woman 15 years her junior). The most explicit memories, however, involve wishing to be mistaken for her father's lover, baths with Daddy and a spanking scene with her father to which she attributes her first orgasm. There is no exploration of why she became both prostitute and madam, exactly how she made her considerable fortune or whether she missed the Happy Hooker days after the success of her bestseller and her deportation from the U.S. and Canada. In Jerry Springer era America, this memoir seems terribly tame and, at 59, Hollander not so much past her prime as no longer in the sexual loop. B&w photos.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Hollander, best known to the world as the Happy Hooker, pens a memoir that is deeply moving and sexual only at the fringes. This is a story about family ties: Hollander's affectionate, exasperating, and surprising relationship with her parents and their complex relationship with each other. Those who remember Hollander as the saucy seventies' swinger may be taken aback by her origins. The daughter of a German mother and Jewish father, she was born in Indonesia where her father was a doctor. Soon after the Japanese occupation, the family was separated, and Hollander and her mother barely survived an internment camp. Amazingly, all returned to Holland, where young Xaviera spent her childhood recovering from this trauma, forging a strong bond with her father, and dealing with her jealousy toward her mother, who in turn was jealous of the other relationships in her husband's life. Hollander, wisely, does not deal overly much with her "career." She starts the book with an affecting description of her mother's last days and ends in that same space. Many mothers and daughters will recognize themselves here; externals seem to melt away in the light of that universal bond. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow (June 4, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060014172
• ISBN-13: 978-0060014179
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 1.4 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,627,358 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The amazing 20th century of a rather special family, June 8, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Child No More: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Xaviera has managed to captivate the 20th Century without losing herself into that what would have sold best, her life as the happy hooker.

In fact, being "the happy hooker" is only a very small part of her life. Born in Indonesia during the second world war, her family was captured and her mother and father separated. At the time Xaviera was only 3 weeks old and she spent the all important first 3 years of her life in this Japanese prisoners camp.

Her father was a psychiatrist. Her mother a famous model with French/German blood married Xaviera's jewish father. In that era of the emerging national socialist party, this wasn't the mainstream marriage at all.

Child no more is a memorial and a memoir, a dedication of a daughter who does want to share the life and the memory of her incredibly special parents. She's at times painfully honest. Her darker demons are not hidden, nor does she try to be the "good daughter". And it is the struggle of her coming to terms with the death of her father, and the more recent death of her mother that is the most gripping. Everyone who'se lost (a) parent(s) will recognise it and find comfort in it.

I've known Xaviera and her mother for a long time. When Xaviera used to invite you to her home to one of her very special parties, her mother would always be there. Enjoying some of it and shaking her head jokingly at the more extravagant guests. I miss her mother, not just at these parties. She was an incredibly strong and charming lady, who knew about her daughter's escapades, but couldn't and wouldn't condemn them. And I've seen Xaviera's love for her mother, especially during the last years of her life. I'm sorry that I've never had the chance to meet her father. Both Xaviera and her mother kept him alive by talking about him openly and in that way he was always there.

I'm amazed how resilient children can be. Spending the first 3 years in a Japanese prisoners camp, where the corporal punishment was incredibly refined, painful, intimidating and brutal. Neither her mother nor Xaviera ever really complained about that horrible period. Only once did I see the horror coming back, and that was when we saw the movie "Paradise Road". Only then Xaviera was able to cry.

If you're more into The Happy Hooker, then you'll be happy that Xaviera's publisher is reprinting this title.
Should you, however, be interested in a very honest, interesting memoir of a family living in the roaring twenties, the depression in the thirties, the war and its after-effects in the forties, the bouncing back in the fifties, the sweet sixties, the happy hooker years, all the way to the millennium, then you will love Child no more. Keep the tissues ready though, this is a book that isn't shy on emotions!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Never twin beds, July 1, 2005

By 

Luc REYNAERT (Beernem, Belgium) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Child No More: A Memoir (Hardcover)

In this autobiography, the 'Happy Hooker' tells without any inhibition her non-hooker life story.

It centres on her fascination with her extrovert womanizing father ( a surgeon) and her more difficult relationship with her introvert mother, a former model.

Her extremely vigorous sexual energy, as well as that of her parents, flows continuously in all directions.
Another returning theme is the universal sexual Phariseism which she encounters all over the world.

This sometimes too exhaustive book paints a quite exemplary destiny of a well-to-do European family: the privileged bright sunshine of colonisation, defeat and a difficult adaptation to a changed European lifestyle after World War II.

Although some chapters will only be really appreciated by the Dutch, this book is, all in all, a worth-while read.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting story, July 26, 2002

By 

L.A. Conselyea (albuquerque, nm) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Child No More: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Great read, incredible life story, my only criticism is towards the end, Ms. Hollander just kind of glosses over things quickly and the book ends abruptly. I would still highly recommend it!