من همسر خودم هستم

by Doug Wright, آراز بارسقیان (Translator)

From the Obie Award-winning author of Quills comes this acclaimed one-man show, which explores the astonishing true story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. A transvestite and celebrated antiques dealer who successfully navigated the two most oppressive regimes of the past century-the Nazis and the Communists--while openly gay and defiantly in drag, von Mahlsdorf was both hailed as a cultural hero and accused of colluding with the Stasi. In an attempt to discern the truth about Charlotte, Doug Wright has written "at once a vivid portrait of Germany in the second half of the twentieth century, a morally complex tale about what it can take to be a survivor, and an intriguing meditation on everything from the obsession with collecting to the passage of time" (Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times).

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre, LGBT, Queer, Nonfiction, History

112 pages, ebook

First published February 9, 2004

About the author

Doug Wright is an American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2004 for his play, I Am My Own Wife.

Reviews

[Ross · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was good and a sympathetic portrayal of a transwoman, but call me a philistine, but I just can't get behind the modern play technique of writing a condensed biography with a few extra scenes of "writer's turmoil" and calling it a work of much effort or talent.

[Jerrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I went to see a stage production of this Pulitzer Prize winning play tonight. Great stage setting, acting and production, but I was so-so on the play itself. Based on the real-life story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who lived and dressed as a woman while surviving both the Nazis and the Stasis. Some of her stories were later called into question. Rather than deal with the moral ambiguity of survival under a fascist regime, however, the author focused more on the fact that he wanted her to be the hero he thought she had been.

[Manik Sukoco · Rating 4 out of 5]

I Am My Own Wife is a rare work that does not merely draw a one noted portrayal of its heroine but fully explores their more questionable aspects and confronts how we record history and the difficulty of finding truth about one individual. Wright had the sense initially that he had discovered a spotless hero in the transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a survivor of both the Nazis and the Communists in East Germany. However, as he discovers that she has perhaps been an informer for the secret police, the lies she has told the playwright unravel and there is little certainty in her autobiography.
On the page, it is difficult to get an idea of what the experience of the play is actually like live, which is easily one of the most stunning plays i've seen in New York. Since the text is composed of what would appear to be scenes between multiple characters, reading it you may imagine something quite different than what is intended and you may picture actual moments between a group of people interacting onstage. However, since the play is written to be performed by one actor as a live event it becomes more about the complexity of a single individual rather than relationships between people. Since the play is meant to be performed with one important exception by a transvestite dressed in merely a simple black dress and a string of pearls, it appears as though one person comes to be so many different things in different situations. Like the nature of Charlotte, the main character, we get a sense as an audience that individuals are not merely one thing or another, but rather their nature is fluid, malleable, and often depends on who is perceiving it.
I highly recommend seeing the production as opposed to reading it because this is thorougly a play crafted for the live event and not the reader, but the text does enhance the experience somewhat. It is a bit clearer which character is speaking when you read the text due to the delineations as opposed to watching one man attempt to portray distinctly and clearly at least 40 character. Mays illuminates the role on broadway but one individual can only do so much. Also, the sense we get of the playwright's struggle to deal with the flaws in Charlotte due to his obsession seemed more apparent to me when reading it.
I Am My Own Wife is an intelligent, funny, and heartbreaking work and i believe it will influence and move theatre artists, audiences and readers for decades to come.

[Felicia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, but having a hard time finishing.
OK, after a bezillion fake starts and forced pick-it-ups, I finally got to a place where I was fascinated by this story. I think the protagonist of this play was named Charlotte von Mahlsdorf -- anyway, what a brilliant life: tranny cabaret historian diva in Nazi Germany. Wow. Just wow. I'd love to see this auf der Buhne.

[Al · Rating 5 out of 5]

Doug won the Pulitzer for this one, so as he says, he'll always have an obituary and it will begin with PPW. It's a tour de force for one actor, and as Wright is wont, deals with the eccentrics that define the life artists take in opposition to the herd. Anytime you have an East German transvestite in the lead role you've got my interest. In a nice way of course.

[Johnny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up in my ongoing quest to read all of the Pulitzer Prize winners in fiction and drama, and I finished it just over an hour. This is a brilliant piece of postmodern drama that chronicles the life of famed German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. I hadn’t heard of von Mahlsdorf prior to reading this play, but I was in high school when she came to fame after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Wright has created an important piece detailing an fascinating component of often unheard of gay history.

Wright’s introduction to the play is rather imperative if you haven’t seen it performed (and I haven’t). The script for this one-man show is written as a typical multi-person cast show with lots of dialogue and multiple characters have lengthy conversations with one another. The introduction details the extensive process WRIGHT underwent to craft the piece, including extensive interviews with von Mahlsdorf herself in Germany over several years. He says that as his relationship with her became deeper and a true friendship blossomed he had a hard time deciding how to convey an accurate—yet dramatic—version of her figure without offending his new friend. As the script took shape thanks to help from actor Jefferson Mays and playwright/director Moisés Kaufman, the latter having previously taken the interview-transcript-as-theater to a new level with The Laramie Project. The result is what appears to be an amazing piece of theater and important historical artifact. I was so intrigued by how one actor could possible pull off this script that I found myself looking up clips on You Tube; what little exists from the professional productions over the past ten years suggests that this must have been a really captivating night at the theater!

Wright openly admits his bias in providing this biography of von Mahlsdorf; he details in the play a letter he wrote to her after their initial meeting in which he told her, “I grew up gay in the Bible Belt; I can only imagine what it must have been like during the Third Reich” (19). His introduction details how he suggests that her story extended his “casual interest in gay history” and that “her quiet heroism—maintaining an unwavering sense of herself during such repressive times—could be a boon to gay men and women everywhere” (xi). Wright even incorporates himself as an integral character in the play; his interviews with von Mahlsdorf provide the structure of the piece, and near the end of the play in bit of meta-theatricality his character tells a friend, “I’m curating her now, and I don’t have the faintest idea what to edit and what to preserve” (76). The irony here is that in reality he has already created the exhibition, and it’s beautiful. In the final pages when Wright’s character describes a photograph—one that opens the print version of the book—of von Mahlsdorf as a young boy at the zoo with two lion cubs, I was moved by the emotional impact of the entire story in my own history as a gay man. This is the type of story that is important to reshape our collective consciousness around gender identity and sexuality, since as Wright points out in the introduction, we live in “an age where politicians still routinely decry homosexuality on the evening news and ‘fag’ remains the most stinging of all playground epithets” (xi). And I’m certain this is why the play won the Pulitzer Prize. With luck though, the importance of work like this that herald the unsung components of a marginalized people will fade as we diversify our social awareness.

[Tom · Rating 1 out of 5]

Interesting enough story, well written for the most part, about a gay man calling himself Charlotte, who managed to survive the Nazi era and Communist Berlin. There's one big ugly problem though. When serious, valid questions start to arise about the veracity of Charlotte's version of her life story, the playwright deliberately and openly avoids dealing with the issue, and the real possibility of Charlotte's having been a paid informer to the brutal regimes she has claimed to have been subverting. The author's stated need for a gay hero trumps his interest in that pesky little thing called "the truth."

And they give out Pulitzers for this.

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating subject for a theatrical piece. Had me reading and wondering as I went, just where Charlotte von Mahlsdorf really fit into the various scenarios. The ending seemed like a 'cop-out' even though it's all based on fact (all of this wonderful drama and secrecy and basically she's just crazy?!). Not a favorite, but well styled and well written.

[lauraღ · Rating 3 out of 5]

You are teaching me a history I never knew I had.

Really interesting, but ultimately kind of lacking. This was originally written as a play and probably worked better as one. I enjoyed the listening experience, but it just left me with the impression that there was so much more about Charlotte's life that we weren't getting. The author did his best to show the complexity, tell all sides of the story, but I still felt like there was a gaping hole in the middle. Also (and I feel this way about all biographies I've read that employ this method of storytelling) I really could have done without the dramatisation, the author inserting titbits of himself and his own life into the book/play. I didn't dislike it, but I'd have much preferred a drier, more factual rendition of the facts of Charlotte's life and her involvement in WWII and the Cold War. But then, that wouldn't have been a play, which is what the author set out to write in the first place. So I don't really have room to complain.

Nevertheless, an enlightening read. Listened to the audiobook as read by Jefferson Mays, who did a pretty impressive array of different voices. There were also some audio snippets from Wright's actual interviews with Charlotte, which was pretty cool. I'm glad I read this, as I didn't know anything about her before it.

Content warnings: transphobia, misgendering, homophobia, use of dated terms, discussion of war and genocide, murder.

[Jay Eckard · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wouldn't /define/ narcissism as a twenty-page exploratory introduction about how you were hesitant to talk about yourself (which is how Wright begins the published version his play), but it makes a pretty good example of it. Of course, Wright comes out of a milieu -- along with Moises Kaufman and Tony Kushner -- that have made a career out of talking about themselves, how deep their reactions are and how keen their understanding is, and mistaking that for a universal gay experience or gay history.

Which might be fine for men of a certain age, as they now are all, but I don't think it speaks to any other, younger generation of gay men and women, or people who aren't so deeply interested in justifying their interest in themselves. The only real hope for this piece, as with Angels in America or The Laramie Project, is as a museum piece: not of the historical moments they allegedly investigate, but of a past era where masturbation was mounted as meaningful theatre.

[Marybeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Pulitzer Prize winning story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (1928-2002), a transgender woman who lived in Germany and survived both the Nazi and Stasi eras. She makes difficult decisions, in self-preservation it would appear, and the play examines the nature of history and memory. Playwright Doug Wright, who includes himself as a character in the play, interviews Charlotte, tells her story, and doesn't shy away from controversy, which results in a play that is all the more poignant because of it. My only quibble was Wright's use of the term transvestite in some descriptions of Charlotte, who clearly lived her everyday adult life as a woman and would be considered transgender today, though that might be a shift in terminology from when the play was first produced in 2003.

[Yooperprof · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow - I'm out of the consensus on this one. I'm just contradictory, I suppose,

For what it's worth: my dislike of this piece is largely because I wanted to learn about Charlotte von Mahlsdorf; I really don't have any interest in learning about Doug Wright.

Moreover, I didn't like the dramaturgy. Maybe it's "effective" on stage to have 35 roles played by one actor, but it seems like a gimmick to me. And I thought that the way that the play jumps around in time was confusing and distracting.

[Rebecca McPhedran · Rating 5 out of 5]

A short, two act play about a famous German transvestite antiques dealer, whom I had never heard of before. This is the story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf who was able to navigate through two of Europes' most turbulent times, both Nazi Germany and The Cold War. The play doesn't go into a lot of detail about the kinds of things she did to survive, both legal and illegal. This would probably be my only criticism, and yet, it just piques my interest even more. An award winning play. A play well deserving, and a quick read, that will surely make you think.

[ZaRi]

شارلوت شروع به خواندن می کند.
در هر فردی مرز ظريفی ميان مردانگی و زنانگی است. همان گونه که نمی توانيم دو برگِ يك شكل از درختی پيدا کنيم، از نظر علمی هم غيرممكن است دو انسان را پيدا کنيم که زنانگی و مردانگی شان از نظر شكل و شماره يكسان باشد.
کتاب را به داگ مي دهد.
شارلوت به داگ: بخون.
حالا داگ از روی متن می خواند.
داگ: پس ما با اين واسطه های رفتاری جنسی بايد طوری رفتار کنيم که باعث جدايی جنسی مرد يا زن نشود. اين يک رفتارِ کاملاً طبيعی ست... می گويند عارضه ست؟
به شارلوت نگاه می کند و منتظر جوابش می شود. شارلوت با سر تاييد می کند...!

[Jon Hewelt · Rating 4 out of 5]

ReRead 9 May 2023
---
I love this play.

I love this play and I want to see it performed someday. And the way it's written, the stage directions . . . it's a script you can actually picture being performed, visualize it as you read it.

It's been a while since I finished it so the details are hazy. But it's a one-person, multiple-character show, sparse props, sparse sets, sparse costumes, and it is incredible. I love it, and you should absolutely check it out.

[Lally · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not adding all the stuff I read in high school to goodreads for the most part, unless it left some impression on me. But this I will add. We read this in A.P. Lit in preparation for seeing it performed at the Goodman. And it was incredible!

[Paula · Rating 4 out of 5]

It takes a few pages to get into the play, but once in, I couldn't put it down. I now want to learn more about Charlotte von Mahlsdorf! I would love to see this play in person with an actor who has the chops to smoothly make all of the transitions possible.

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow... what a great piece of work. I would love to see it performed.

[Emma Rund · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this play but I didn't love it. I think this is one I would need to see.

[Isabel Schmieta · Rating 4 out of 5]

I Am My Own Wife is a one-man show written by Doug Wright and based on the true life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, whose autobiography is titled the same. Von Mahlsdorf's story was one I was completely unaware of until yesterday, when I stumbled upon this audiobook.

Although the audiobook is short, it was very interesting and chocked full of information, inspired by actual interviews that were conducted with von Mahlsdorf. We even get clips of the original recordings towards the end. I also enjoyed how the audiobook was made more as a performance, rather than a formal reading, including various voices, sound effects, and also German phrases tossed in (with the quality of the German accent varying, of course - but this added to the entertainment factor, in my opinion).

It's interesting that she is completely unknown to me, given the fact that I spent a year in Berlin and she seems to be a pretty prominent figure (as an openly gay and transgender woman, living both through World War II and the GDR) and I would've loved to visit her Gründezeit Museum while I was there. I have added her autobiography to my reading list and her museum to bucket list and look forward to learning more about her fascinating life.

Just as a little background on who she is:

Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (18 March 1928 – 30 April 2002) was a transgender woman who founded the Gründerzeit Museum in Berlin-Mahlsdorf. When a local mansion was due for demolition, von Mahlsdorf was allowed to live there, and its contents became the basis for her collection of everyday household items from the Gründerzeit period (c. 1870’s). The museum became a popular meeting-point for East Berlin’s gay community, to the disapproval of the East German regime, and Charlotte could only save it by becoming an unofficial collaborator for the secret police (Stasi).

At a very young age she felt more like a girl, and expressed more interest in the clothing and articles of little girls. She helped a second-hand goods dealer clear out the apartments of deported Jews and sometimes kept items. Max Berfelde, Charlotte's father, was already a member of the Nazi Party by the late 1920s and he had become a party leader in Mahlsdorf. In 1942 he forced Charlotte to join the Hitler Youth. They often quarreled, but the situation escalated in 1944 when her mother left the family during the evacuation. Max demanded that Charlotte choose between parents, threatening her with a gun and leaving her in a room with an hour to choose; when he came in to kill her, she struck him with a rolling pin and killed him. In January 1945, after several weeks in a psychiatric institution, Charlotte was sentenced by a court in Berlin to four years' detention as an anti-social juvenile delinquent. She did not serve the full term because the jails were opened at the end of the war.

[Stop]

Read an excerpt from Doug Wright's introduction to the reissue of Tennessee Williams' The Night Of The Iguana

The following is an introduction by Doug Wright to Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana, excerpted from the version of Williams' play recently reissued by New Directions Publishing.



UNCLE TENNESSEE

My mother had a headache, and so I came to know the work of Tennessee Williams.

Dallas, Texas, is a more sophisticated city now, but in 1974 it was still a cultural backwater, and my parents were absolutely vigilant about exposing us to the intermittent art that came our way. The local university hosted an annual subscription series: for a modest fee, you could attend lectures, concerts, literary readings, and plays throughout the year. Eagerly, my parents joined.

Subscription nights were very special indeed. My mother would apply lipstick (something she rarely did), my father would come home from his law offi ce on the early side, and together they’d leave my siblings and me in the company of our elderly babysitter, who’d turn on the TV, pop some Jiffy - Pop, and pray for the best. The next morning over breakfast, Mom and Dad would regale us with tales of PDQ Bach and his hilarious piano, or recount the thrill of hearing Garson Kanin read from one of his novels.

But one evening in the fall of my twelfth year, my mother announced that she was feeling peaked; it was one of her sinus headaches. That meant that my father was saddled with an extra ticket. He could go by himself, or recruit one of the children. My brother was more interested in his model planes than art with a capital “A,” and my sister was too young to sit still for two hours, so I was drafted.

Of course, I’d been to the theater before. I’d seen children’s fare at the Junior Player’s Guild, ranging from Rumpelstiltskin to Frog and Toad, and I knew Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel by heart. I’d even been to a grown - up play: Life with Father by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse.

But if my parents had known the bill that evening, they might have been more circumspect. After all, I was at an impressionable age. Still, they were progressive people, and I’m sure they reasoned that a night spent in the presence of a Great American Drama — any Great American Drama —was preferable to one in front of the idiot box. Why shouldn’t they expose me to the canon early? It’s never too early, is it, to instill a life - long love of literature? And that’s how I came to see a touring production of A Streetcar Named Desire.

I don’t recall the name of the theater company. I don’t recall the cast. In truth, I don’t know if it was a professional or an amateur production.

What do I remember? Decades later, I can still recall the image of Blanche, pristine in white gloves, entering the lurid world of the French Quarter as a jazz saxophonist plaintively wails in the night. I can’t forget Stanley, crudely handsome, his chest bare, strutting about the stage like a prizefighter in a red silk robe that clung to his physique like Saran - Wrap. (It was the first time I’d seen a man as lovingly eroticized as the Playboy Bunnies I’d glanced at the drugstore newsstand; it mesmerized and terrified me at the same time.) Echoing in my ears, I can still hear the horrible cry of “Fire! Fire!” as our heroine, her hair now wild and loose, and her prim suit replaced by a disheveled kimono, tries to incite and suppress potential rape.

Most of all, I remember hearing music as recognizable and singular as Gershwin or Mozart, with as distinct and enduring a melody. But it wasn’t born of instruments; it was borne of words. It was the same vernacular my grandmother used when I visited her in Springfi eld, Missouri (“You’ve such fragile, fair skin for a little boy,” she’d say, or “It’s the last dress I’m ever going to buy, pale peach, to match the lining of my casket”), but elevated to the level of poetry. It wasn’t naturalistic; it was somehow truer. It conveyed the terrors and the pleasures of life with greater acuity than spontaneous speech ever could. And though the play was performed in a darkened theater for hundreds of spectators, I felt instead that it had been whispered in my ear by the author, imparted as a delicious and mortifying secret that only the two of us shared.

When I left the theater that night, there were three people in my father’s navy - blue Lincoln Continental. Dad was in the driver’s seat, I was next to him, and perched in the back, invisible except to me, sat a figure in a Panama hat and crumpled linen suit, with the slightest hint of liquor on his breath. During the play, he’d slyly implicated himself in my life; I knew he wasn’t leaving anytime soon. He caught my glance in the rearview mirror. The wicked twinkle in his eye and the sad, wise cackle when he laughed carried a promise: he was my new Uncle. He would teach me all the reckless, impolite truths about life no one else in the confines of my hometown possibly could. Some would be salacious. Others would be too moving, too profound to bear. All of them would be well beyond the purview of my mom and dad.

Later that week when our art teacher at school assigned dioramas, I took a shoebox, doll furniture from my sister, and scraps of fabric from mother’s sewing box, and built my own model of the Kowalski residence, complete with tiny beer bottles and a Chinese lantern fashioned from tissue paper. That same week, I stole an old bathrobe of my mother’s and a stringy blonde wig from our box of Halloween costumes, and put them on, so that I could intone tragically before the mirror, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” When Mother poured me a soda pop one day after school, I flashed a coy smile and inquired coquettishly in my best antebellum drawl, “Is this ... just Coke?” She just looked at me, baffled.


Read the complete excerpt...

[Emilie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A portrait of transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf who, surrounded by a life-time of collected furniture, raises the question of what we choose to preserve. Her existence alone, surviving both Nazi Germany and the USSR, is a curiosity that Wright struggles to conserve. A fantastic story that suffers awfully from being told by an American.

[Ginger Gritzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd love to read the full biography of this remarkable person.

[Miki]

Ahhh, what a nice way to begin my foray into dramatic texts this year! And now I want to learn more about Charlotte von Mahlsdorf :)

[Monika]

"the gays were cowards, they ran away. But the lesbians, they stayed to fight"
Soooooo true and real!!!

[Ivonne Rovira · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finished reading this unusual play about the East German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf in less than an hour. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, she was first noticed as a curiosity, then as a heroine -- an unabashed transvestite who survived both the Nazis and the Communists and saved the trappings of a Weimer Era gay club -- and finally, as a frightened gay man who did what he whatever he had to -- including snitch to the German Stazi (secret police).

The play is somewhat unsatisfactory; however, it's hard to blame playwright Doug Wright. Who really understood Charlotte von Mahlsdorf? How much of what she said was true? How much of it was exaggeration to aggrandize herself or deflect censure? What was the truth of her relationship with the Stazi? While the play explored the ambiguity -- and Wright's disappointment that a person he looked up to should carry such reprehensible baggage -- I never felt all that involved with Charlotte, other than as a curiosity.

I Am My Own Wife is definitely worth reading; however, don't expect something like Romulus Linney's 2, which provided a mesmerizing look into the contradictory life of Hermann Goering, Hitler's second-in-command.

[Justin Levine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not the best of the Pulitzer-winning dramas. The structure, intent, and telling of the story is far to precious--practically by the author's own admission--to be digested properly. There are myriad tomes of historical drama (The Laramie Project (who's creator, Moises Kaufman, subsequently directed the Broadway production), Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, The Farnsworth Invention, and War Horse, to name a few) that effectively capture the spirit, scope and impact of their respective subjects in translating to the stage. Though a fascinating character in LGBT history, to be sure, the play reads in far to biased a fashion to have far-reaching accessibility.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charlotte von Mahlsdorf had a bit of a schizophrenic presence in German media: she was seen as a transvestite hero, a survivor of the Nazi and Communist regimes, and a proud founder of the Gründerzeit Museum while also being portrayed as a Stasi collaborator and a traitor to the GLBT underground in East Germany. So it is perhaps appropriate that in Doug Wright's play Mahlsdorf essentially takes on 37 roles and personalities, including Nazi thugs, Stasi agents, marginalized Berliners, US servicemen, and even the playwright himself. The work centers around Wright's attempt to document Mahlsdorf's life through interviews before her death. And what a life it was: everything from murdering her oppressive father and spending time in a Nazi prison to obsessing over curios and phonographs. In the end, however, Wright ends up discovering more questions about Mahlsdorf than answers, but this is an intriguing read nonetheless...and an amazing stage show I imagine.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I Am My Own Wife is a play is about how we record history; what we include, what we exclude, and how to approach both the good and the more unsavory parts of a person. Lohar/Charlotte is an intriguing character based on a real person who grew up on Germany, lived through WW2 and the dismantling of the Berlin wall. These facts could apply to millions of Germans but her story is unique in both the telling and the point of view of the teller. I Am My Own Wife won the Pulitzer for drama a few years back. For writers, just as interesting as the actual play is the foreward in which playwright Wright (author also of "Quills", both play and screenplay) discusses the process he went through to arrive at the completed play. You truly get a sense of a work in progress and the many paths he could have trod in getting this to the stage. Highly recommended.

[Kristina · Rating 4 out of 5]

What can you do when you find out too much of the subject of your next play? During your research, you find that your idolized main character is flawed. And even worse yet, you aren't entirely sure what is the truth. The author of this play, Doug Wright, struggles with his conscience and his creative process and crafts an honest portrayal of Charlotte, a transvestite who struggled against child abuse, the SS, and the Stasi. Charlotte has amassed a museum of gay cabaret memorabilia, which she has kept hidden and safe. But at what price? How much did she divulge to the Stasi? And does her participation in the regime's "big brother" information collecting somehow lessen her contributions? Quick and interesting read.