Travel Light, Move Fast
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From the bestselling author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, a warm and candid memoir of grief, a deeply-felt tribute to her father, and a compulsively readable continuation of a brilliant series of books on her family.
You can survive more than you'd believe; Dad had told me that. He'd also told me you can survive more than you want; but it's not always up to you, not the enormous things, those are beyond all control.
When her father becomes gravely ill on holiday in Budapest, Alexandra Fuller rushes to join her mother at his bedside. Defiant until the end, together they see out his last days, and then they must navigate the bleak comedy of organizing a cremation and the transport of ashes back to their family home in Africa. As they make this journey and begin to grieve together, Fuller realizes that if she is going to weather her father's loss, she will need to become the parts of him that she misses most.
A master of time and memory, Fuller moves seamlessly between the days and months following her father's death, and her memories of a childhood spent running after him in southern and central Africa. And her own life begins to change. She faces seemingly irreparable family fallout, new love found and lost, and eventually further, unimaginable bereavement, holding fast to the lessons her father taught her about how to survive whatever life throws at you.
Writing with reverent irreverence of the rollicking misadventures of her mother and father, bursting with pandemonium and tragedy, here is a story of joy, resilience, and vitality, from a writer at the very height of her powers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Grieving the loss of her father, Fuller (Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight) revisits her tumultuous upbringing "farming in a war zone" during the Rhodesian Bush War in the 1970s through the present day in this arresting memoir. The book opens in 2015 Budapest, where she sits vigil over her father, Tim, in a hospital ICU for 12 days, recalling how his restlessness kept his young family moving from one remote location to another, before he dies. Madcap events involving oddball characters play out as Fuller plans for his cremation and her mother's return to their farm in Zambia. Four months after Tim's death, the family gathers to scatter his ashes, and Fuller introduces her fianc , an American artist she lives with in Wyoming. Old wounds reopen over her "Awful Books" bestselling memoirs she's written about the family and in the aftermath she's estranged from her sister, her writing stalls, and her engagement breaks off. Just before book's end, an unforeseen death in July 2018 engulfs her in pain that "would have no end, it would have no shape, it would shape me." Darkly comic dialogue deepens Fuller's piercing narrative, yet Tim's timeless wisdom strikes the most resonant note: "It'll be all right in the end; if it isn't all right, it isn't the end."Beautifully crafted, Fuller's moving memoir flows with precision and compassion.