Fi: A Memoir of My Son

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Description

The story of a mother grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child - from the award-winning and bestselling memoirist of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight It's midsummer in Wyoming and Alexandra Fuller 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. 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. By turns disarming, devastating and unexpectedly, blessedly funny, Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grieving a child in a culture that has no instructions for it.

Reviews

Life writers often want to be likeable. Fullers not in that camp: rawly bereft, she doesnt care how she comes across Its no easy ride in her company, but thats the point: she doesnt spare us the pain inflicted by the sharp knife of a short life * Guardian *
A profound and gripping memoir about surviving unexpected, devastating loss * Sunday Times *

Author Bio

Alexandra Fuller is the author of four memoirs, including Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight - a New York Times Notable Book for 2002, the 2002 Booksense Best Non-Fiction book, a finalist for the Guardian's First Book Award and the winner of the 2002 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize - and the New York Times-bestselling Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, two books of non-fiction, and the novel Quiet Until the Thaw. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, National Geographic, Granta, The New York Times, Guardian and Financial Times.