0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
"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.
-
Creators
-
Publisher
-
Release date
April 9, 2024 -
Formats
-
OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9798890598189
- File size: 184742 KB
- Duration: 06:24:52
-
-
Languages
- English
-
Reviews
-
In this memoir of the unexpected death of her son, Fi, Alexandra Fuller pulls off quite a feat by simultaneously filling her voice with both life and loss. Fuller grew up in Zimbabwe (DON'T LET'S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT), and her rich, warm voice contains appealing traces of that accent. Fi died at age 21 despite having no real health problems, and grief and incomprehension are clear in every word Fuller utters. But she is acerbically funny, too. One of her attempts to recover a sense of equilibrium is attending a silent retreat in Canada. The experience is odd enough, but the guard she encounters upon reentering the U.S. at an out-of-the-way border post is hilariously bonkers. Fuller is often bursting with rage and physical pain, and her voice quickening into a near-rant with a raw edge translates both word and feeling perfectly. A.B. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
-