Alexandra Fuller has long made loss her gain. Starting in 2001 with her first memoir, the terrifyingly fine Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, she has done the emotional math and kept score of her life. How could she not?
She grew up a child of the imploding British Empire—and of two gorgeously reckless parents—in southern Africa. Her sentimental education was the war that violently birthed Zimbabwe from Rhodesia and her family’s drift from one belly-up land venture to the next, with round-the-clock cocktails and a “confetti” of Jack Russell terriers their preferred haze against inopportune realities, lingering trauma, and mental collapse.
She married young, and wrongheadedly. She became a mother. She wrote novels before sunrise that were rejected. Her children grew. She didn’t see the shadows their future was writing on the wall.
Her memoir won her awards and literary celebrity. Yet her mother and only sister never forgave her for the immediate best-seller, which they called the “awful book.” Fuller just wrote more about them, and her dashing father, her marriage’s dissolution, and the paradox of a beguiling neighbor who had waged appalling warfare.
Fi: A Memoir of My Son is Fuller’s eighth book. Her writing is always a knife pointed straight at the heart, but the subtractions her new book chronicles give it something more like blunt force. In 2018, her son died. He was 21. She had to come up with new math.
Starting with her first memoir, the terrifyingly fine Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller has done the emotional math and kept score of her life.
The American West is Fuller’s home and her writing’s filter now. Marriage to a Philadelphia blueblood with a family history of ranching took her to Wyoming; divorce failed to sever her roots there. As per earlier reports from her life’s minefield, there’s a matter of lovers and landscape. She’s moved by a yurt (not my idea of bliss) and the more solitary proposition of a sheep wagon, the welcome rhythm of riding horses, of planting and friendship.
Above all, her prose is lulled by her joy in her three children, the magic number around which her universe revolves, the oppositional force to repeating her parents’ frightfully English brand of benign neglect. Her surgical lyricism is a repeated rite of passage; Fi and his two sisters, the promise it allows her to keep.
Until it can’t. Until the loss of Fi. An athlete, a leader, an adored middle child, Charles Fuller “Fi” Ross died in his sleep a few weeks after suffering a seizure that doctors had dismissed as a transient occurrence.
“Everything that I’d believed until then blinked out with him,” Fuller writes. Her older daughter puts it this way: “I don’t know who I am without him.” In part, Fi is about climbing back to belief—any kind of belief—one rung at a time.
Belief can also be a form of rejection. Modern medicine’s answers were not for her—she refuses to read Fi’s autopsy report or look at his health records. Her days are measured in pain; the rational is canceled out by shock.
“Everything that I’d believed until then blinked out with him.”
Fuller, we’re reminded, is of a different, ritualistic persuasion, casting herself as a spirit seeker in the indigenous-African mold and that of the surrounding Lakota people, scattering Fi’s ashes to the mountains he loved in a gesture of magical thinking that gropes for peace in the dark corners of the story this book pushes itself to tell.
Unresolved grief throws it off course more than once, gunking up Fuller’s usually unflinching style and the poetic precision that hones it. A clichéd paean to a bad-news bombshell of a lesbian lover is cringe-adjacent, for starters—a blonde “Aphrodite” riding a half-shell of mawkish writing, festooned with former addictions and puppyish adulation.
In veering into quest lit, Fuller also strings together a series of psychobabbly retreats that can seem a smidgen enamored of entitlement. She’s gifted with an all-expenses-paid visit to a New Mexico “grief sanctuary,” and the daily luxuries of a Hawaiian beach house a friend loans her appear tended to by invisible hands, though the psychic comforts yielded by a woo-woo meditation camp in chilly Canada come with privation attached.
Fuller’s fight for survival is against odds no parent should have to face, and it is unpadded and harsh. It means coming to terms with a loss Fuller is unsure she can handle without Fi to guide her. Fi is concerned with finding a way.
Celia McGee is a New York–based arts-and-culture reporter. She writes regularly about books for The New York Times and other publications