Fi: A Memoir of My Son

By Alexandra Fuller

Book Overview

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

"A mesmeric celebration of a boy who died too soon, a mother's love and her resilience. It will help others surviving loss -- surviving life." -- David Sheff, New York Times

"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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802161049
• ISBN13: 9780802161048
• Release Date: April 2024
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.4" x 8.3"