Fi
A Memoir of My Son
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
** PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST 2025 **
The story of a mother grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child – from the bestselling memoirist of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
‘Truly extraordinary’ HELEN MACDONALD
‘A mesmeric celebration... Will help others surviving loss – surviving life’
NEW YORK TIMES
It’s midsummer 2018, and Alexandra Fuller is about to turn fifty, but feels like her life is coming apart. She vows to get herself back on an 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, her home country of Zimbabwe – Alexandra is nonetheless levelled. At the same time, she is painfully aware that she cannot succumb and abandon her two surviving daughters. From a sheep waggon in the mountains of Wyoming to a silent meditation retreat in Alberta, Canada, she embarks on a journey up and down the spine of the Rocky Mountains, trying to find out how to grieve herself whole.
‘For anyone who’s ever loved and lost, or ever will; in short, a book for us all’ OPRAH DAILY
‘A profound and gripping memoir’ SUNDAY TIMES
* A BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST AND TIME *
Customer Reviews
A complicated truth
Few can create the self as narrator, victim and heroine, with the drama, melodrama, self-awareness, self-indulgence, raw, abrasive honesty, fictive truth, and rich control oh language as Fuller.
The innocence that cradled her first memoir of family and childhood which was rooted in the integrity of young memory has been lost. Fuller knows what sells, and she writes as catharsis, but also for an American audience, one that can relate to many different forms of violence.
This is a very complicated narrative, again and again, I found myself asking what is truth, where does it lie (in both senses of the word)?