Fi: A Memoir of My Son

From the award-winning New York Times-bestselling
author of Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller, comes a
career defining memoir about grieving the sudden loss of her
twenty-one-year-old child

"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 and unexpectedly,
blessedly funny, Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grieving
a child in a culture that has no instructions for it.

Author: Alexandra Fuller
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 04/09/2024
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.40w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780802161048


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 02/01/2024
Booklist 02/15/2024 pg. 15

About the Author
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.