Fi A memoir of my son

Fuller, who has vividly chronicled her childhood in Zimbabwe and her unique family in multiple memoirs, starting in 2001 with Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, turns here to every parent's worst nightmare, the death of a child. Fuller's beloved son, Fi, passed away suddenly and shockingly while he was sleeping at age 21 in 2018. Utterly destroyed by grief, Fuller must find a way to carry on for her two devastated daughters. Fuller's mother knows this kind of loss intimately. Fuller's younger sister Olivia drowned at age two, but Fuller's mother and older sister are locked in their own conflict, leaving Fuller to lean on friends and an ex-lover who is determined to offer support. Fuller's prose is raw, primal, and electric, pulling the reader into both her shock and her attempts to carry on with a heart cleaved in two. Readers who are experiencing their own grief will find solace here, while those who've been following Fuller for years through her beautifully written memoirs will want to be with her as she recounts this tragedy.

A parent's brave memoir about the death of her son at age 21. The summer before her 50th birthday, Fuller, the author of multiple acclaimed nonfiction books, was not where she expected to be in life: divorced, in a relationship with a younger woman, missing her home country of Zimbabwe, and mourning her father's death and her mother's estrangement. Then, her son, Fi, died suddenly. "I couldn't see my hand in front of my face; it was that dark," she writes. As she worked through her grief, she also had to care for her two heartbroken daughters. Raised by a mother who descended into all-consuming depression following the unexpected deaths of three of Fuller's siblings, the author was determined not to abandon her own children in the same way. "I didn't survive and also…I did," she writes, movingly. "Fi died, and everything that I'd believed until then blinked out with him." In the wake of immense loss, what remains? With clear, luminous prose and courageous insight, Fuller investigates. Whether seeking spirituality in a sheep wagon in the mountains of Wyoming, at a grief retreat in New Mexico, or on the beaches of Hawaii, the author has never ceased yearning, searching, and believing in her family. As much about love as it is about grief, this book is a roadmap for loss. "The way a pilot sees wind in clouds or a sailor reads currents in water," she writes, "I look unconsciously for stories to remind me where I am, to remind me that whatever I'm going through, millions have been here before, are here now, will be here again." The writing is so stunning, immediate, and heartfelt that the book is often as difficult to read as it is to put down. A true marvel of a memoir, simultaneously beautiful and devastating. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.