It is 1968. Mabel, nursing her most serious mauling yet, is just turning eighty and about to lose her job at Jungleland, a California game park. Devastated by the loss of her cats, she looks back on her life and her five husbands: the fifth–a cross-dresser whom she married without bothering to divorce the other four–would one day be tragically mauled by her one true love, her ferocious yet amorous 550-pound Bengal tiger, Rajah.

Starting with her escape from a mental institution to begin her circus career as a burlesque dancer, Mabel’s exquisitely voiced confession is a live wire of dark secrets, broken dreams, and comic escapades. It is a brilliant, exhilarating story of an America before television and movies, when the spectacle of the circus reigned and an unlikely woman captured the public imagination with her singular charm and audacity.