Fi : A Memoir
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
From the award-winning New York Times bestselling author, Alexandra Fuller, comes a career defining memoir about grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child
“Fair to say, I was in a ribald state the summer before my fiftieth birthday.” And so begins Alexandra Fuller’s open, vivid new memoir, Fi. It’s midsummer in Wyoming and Alexandra is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, reeling from a midlife breakup, freshly sober and piecing her way uncertainly through a volatile new relationship with a younger woman, Alexandra vows to get herself back on even keel.
And then—suddenly and incomprehensibly—her son Fi, at twenty-one years old, dies in his sleep.
No stranger to loss—young siblings, a parent, a home country—Alexandra is nonetheless leveled. At the same time, she is painfully aware that she cannot succumb and abandon her two surviving daughters as her mother before her had done. From a sheep wagon deep in the mountains of Wyoming to a grief sanctuary in New Mexico to a silent meditation retreat in Alberta, Canada, Alexandra journeys up and down the spine of the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to find how to grieve herself whole. There is no answer, and there are countless answers—in poetry, in rituals and routines, in nature and in the indigenous wisdom she absorbed as a child in Zimbabwe. By turns disarming, devastating andunexpectedly, blessedly funny, Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grieving a child in a culture that has no instructions for it.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Prepare to bawl your eyes out, learn a lot, and even laugh a little over the course of this heart-ripping memoir. Alexandra Fuller is famous for drawing on her own life for material. But after losing her 21-year-old son Fi without warning, writing became an unavoidable way of working through the sorrow. Between the surviving children she had to comfort, her mother (who’d been hugely altered by losing children herself), and her ex-husband, Fuller had some intense family dynamics to deal with, too. Fi documents her emotional journey, starting with formative memories of her childhood in what was then Rhodesia, capturing the devastating blow of Fi’s sudden death, and chronicling her efforts at coming to terms with her grief. But she breaks down her struggles with the soul of a poet, throws ideas around with the weight of a philosopher, and even finds time for some wit. It’s impossible to imagine the audiobook being narrated by someone else—the intimate impact of her reading is heartbreaking and beautiful at the same time.
