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Fi: A Memoir of My Son
“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 21 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.
And then – suddenly and incomprehensibly - her son Fi, at 21 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.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published April 9, 2024
About the author
Alexandra Fuller
17 books998 followersAlexandra Fuller has written five books of non-fiction.
Her debut book, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (Random House, 2001), was 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.
Her 2004 Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier (Penguin Press) won the Ulysses Prize for Art of Reportage.
The Legend of Colton H Bryant was published in May, 2008 by Penguin Press and was a Toronto Globe and Mail, Best Non-Fiction Book of 2008.
Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness was published in August 2011 (Penguin Press).
Her latest book, Leaving Before the Rains Come, was published in January 2015 (Penguin Press).
Fuller has also written extensively for magazines and newspapers including the New Yorker Magazine, National Geographic Magazine, Vogue and Granta Magazine. Her reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review; The Financial Times and the Toronto Globe and Mail.
Fuller was born in England in 1969 and moved to Africa with her family when she was two. She married an American river guide in Zambia in 1993. They left Africa in 1994 and moved to Wyoming, where Fuller still resides. She has three children.
Her debut book, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (Random House, 2001), was 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.
Her 2004 Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier (Penguin Press) won the Ulysses Prize for Art of Reportage.
The Legend of Colton H Bryant was published in May, 2008 by Penguin Press and was a Toronto Globe and Mail, Best Non-Fiction Book of 2008.
Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness was published in August 2011 (Penguin Press).
Her latest book, Leaving Before the Rains Come, was published in January 2015 (Penguin Press).
Fuller has also written extensively for magazines and newspapers including the New Yorker Magazine, National Geographic Magazine, Vogue and Granta Magazine. Her reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review; The Financial Times and the Toronto Globe and Mail.
Fuller was born in England in 1969 and moved to Africa with her family when she was two. She married an American river guide in Zambia in 1993. They left Africa in 1994 and moved to Wyoming, where Fuller still resides. She has three children.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 41 reviews
April 2, 2024
All parents who hear of Fi's death have told me this: I wouldn't survive the death of my child, as if my child's death must therefore have been a lesser death than the death of their child would be. Or me, as if I must be a less grief-stricken parent than they would be, if it happened to them. I tell them that I didn't survive and also that I did. Both things happened. (loc. 1358*)
Alexandra Fuller was still grieving the loss of her father when the unthinkable happened—her son Fi died suddenly, unexpectedly, still in the prime of his youth. And Fuller came undone, because what else can you do when that happens?
This is a grief memoir—full stop. Fuller is a hell of a writer, which is not news. Here she spills herself broken onto the page: questioning how she can possibly be expected to survive, pulling from book after book and writer after writer to articulate the depths of her loss and apply balm to her soul. She takes to the mountains and the sky, to the ocean and a grief retreat and a meditation retreat, not in some sort of targeted quest but because the only thing she can do is give her life over to grief, and to find new rhythms for it.
It's worse in town, in the condo, my restlessness, my panic. Only the wild—even the scorched, diminished, smoke-hazed wild—seems conducive to my unwieldy grief. Grand enough to be the grief, to soak up the grief, to reflect it back at me, my feelings as thunder, wind, wildfire. In the mountains, I'd understood the warp and weft of my grief; I'd accepted its weather. In the mountains my grief was shouted back at me with praise and with majesty, in the oldest, most sovereign sense of that word. (loc. 1628)
I have not read Travel Light, Move Fast, Fuller's memoir about her father's death, but Fi died when she was partway through writing it, and there's no way on earth that that didn't reset the shape of that book. Someday I'll pick that up too, because I'm curious about how they overlap and how they don't, and also because I don't think it's possible for Fuller to write a book that is anything other than dramatic and sharp and so vivid it hurts.
Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.
*I read an ARC, and quotes may not be final.
Alexandra Fuller was still grieving the loss of her father when the unthinkable happened—her son Fi died suddenly, unexpectedly, still in the prime of his youth. And Fuller came undone, because what else can you do when that happens?
This is a grief memoir—full stop. Fuller is a hell of a writer, which is not news. Here she spills herself broken onto the page: questioning how she can possibly be expected to survive, pulling from book after book and writer after writer to articulate the depths of her loss and apply balm to her soul. She takes to the mountains and the sky, to the ocean and a grief retreat and a meditation retreat, not in some sort of targeted quest but because the only thing she can do is give her life over to grief, and to find new rhythms for it.
It's worse in town, in the condo, my restlessness, my panic. Only the wild—even the scorched, diminished, smoke-hazed wild—seems conducive to my unwieldy grief. Grand enough to be the grief, to soak up the grief, to reflect it back at me, my feelings as thunder, wind, wildfire. In the mountains, I'd understood the warp and weft of my grief; I'd accepted its weather. In the mountains my grief was shouted back at me with praise and with majesty, in the oldest, most sovereign sense of that word. (loc. 1628)
I have not read Travel Light, Move Fast, Fuller's memoir about her father's death, but Fi died when she was partway through writing it, and there's no way on earth that that didn't reset the shape of that book. Someday I'll pick that up too, because I'm curious about how they overlap and how they don't, and also because I don't think it's possible for Fuller to write a book that is anything other than dramatic and sharp and so vivid it hurts.
Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.
*I read an ARC, and quotes may not be final.
April 27, 2024
“Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy”. This memoir of her son, and of the process of dealing with her grief at his death, is one of the best observations of grief I have read. As one would well understand, Ms. Fuller was completely shattered when her son died suddenly of a seizure, in his sleep. He had had one previous seizure episode, relatively minor in nature, but serious enough to be checked by a doctor, who found no cause for the event, and saw no reason to be concerned for Fi's future health.
As she describes it, the family of her two daughters, herself, and Fi were exceptionally close, and Fi was an outstanding person in every way, a leader, an athlete, a scholar, a compassionate young man, and this of course made his death even harder to take. Alexandra’s first response to the news was literally to want to die. Only the knowledge that her daughters needed her moderated the intense desire to drop dead, but she was non-functioning, shattered, and abed for weeks. Then gradually, with help from friends, over a period of months, she moved back toward the land of the living, and became functional again, but she was not healed, she was not well. Her daughters were, if not as distraught as she was, then at least depressed; Fi had been their beloved brother and friend, and just as Ms. Fuller could not conceive of a future without Fi, neither could they.
Fuller moved to a yurt in a meadow to be closer to nature, and she found this helped her bear the pain of loss much better than her previous existence in a condominium apartment. Having grown up living an out-of-doors life in Africa, it makes sense that nature would be a healing force for her. It certainly is for me. Finally, a friend who owned a house in Hawaii convinced her to go there and live for a month with her daughters and her former girlfriend, and that month finally brought her and her daughters sufficiently out of mourning, that they finally, for the first time since Fi’s death, laughed.
I cannot fathom how bad it must be to lose a child, it simply beggars the imagination of any parent. And yet as Ms. Fuller points out, from our earliest existence, parents have lost children. Just as I have never stopped missing my father, Alexandra Fuller will never stop mourning her son, but she explains how she arrived at a point where she could live with grief, and yet not be its slave.
As she describes it, the family of her two daughters, herself, and Fi were exceptionally close, and Fi was an outstanding person in every way, a leader, an athlete, a scholar, a compassionate young man, and this of course made his death even harder to take. Alexandra’s first response to the news was literally to want to die. Only the knowledge that her daughters needed her moderated the intense desire to drop dead, but she was non-functioning, shattered, and abed for weeks. Then gradually, with help from friends, over a period of months, she moved back toward the land of the living, and became functional again, but she was not healed, she was not well. Her daughters were, if not as distraught as she was, then at least depressed; Fi had been their beloved brother and friend, and just as Ms. Fuller could not conceive of a future without Fi, neither could they.
Fuller moved to a yurt in a meadow to be closer to nature, and she found this helped her bear the pain of loss much better than her previous existence in a condominium apartment. Having grown up living an out-of-doors life in Africa, it makes sense that nature would be a healing force for her. It certainly is for me. Finally, a friend who owned a house in Hawaii convinced her to go there and live for a month with her daughters and her former girlfriend, and that month finally brought her and her daughters sufficiently out of mourning, that they finally, for the first time since Fi’s death, laughed.
I cannot fathom how bad it must be to lose a child, it simply beggars the imagination of any parent. And yet as Ms. Fuller points out, from our earliest existence, parents have lost children. Just as I have never stopped missing my father, Alexandra Fuller will never stop mourning her son, but she explains how she arrived at a point where she could live with grief, and yet not be its slave.
March 23, 2024
There is no word for a person who has lost a child, even one fully grown to adulthood. They are still your child. There is the term widow, widower, but no term exists in English for that reversal of nature when a parent outlives a child. Grief takes over, and the memory of that person who a parent has known since before birth haunt and flood, and all aspects of that person recur. When Alexandra Fuller's son, aged 21, dies in his sleep, she and the entire family is encompassed by grief. Gifted with a poet's soul, she adds to her memoirs with this depiction of that grief, shattering and redemptive at the same time.
March 29, 2024
4.5 rounded to 5 stars
“Let the weather come, and come. I will stand.”
Alexandra Fuller is an “auto-read” author for me. Anything they write, I will read.
The story of Fi (pronounced “fee”) is of Fuller’s son who passes away unexpectedly in his early twenties. The author takes us through their grief in Wyoming, New Mexico, and Alberta, while trying to juggle her new relationship with a woman, and with her two remaining children. It is raw, emotional, and beautiful. The audiobook is narrated by Fuller, themself. Their voice and tone really makes the story come alive, and connects you to her pain, that much more.
Worth the read if you can handle the emotions.
(I received this ALC via NetGalley in return for an honest review. Thank you.)
“Let the weather come, and come. I will stand.”
Alexandra Fuller is an “auto-read” author for me. Anything they write, I will read.
The story of Fi (pronounced “fee”) is of Fuller’s son who passes away unexpectedly in his early twenties. The author takes us through their grief in Wyoming, New Mexico, and Alberta, while trying to juggle her new relationship with a woman, and with her two remaining children. It is raw, emotional, and beautiful. The audiobook is narrated by Fuller, themself. Their voice and tone really makes the story come alive, and connects you to her pain, that much more.
Worth the read if you can handle the emotions.
(I received this ALC via NetGalley in return for an honest review. Thank you.)
November 18, 2023
I should have know that this book will trigger my own depression. It is sad, devastating and very personal. Don't read it if you have lost somebody you love or if you already suffer of depression.
April 19, 2024
I received an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I am leaving this review of my own accord.
This is one of the most beautiful memoirs I’ve ever encountered. I couldn’t ask for better writing, narration, reflection, and the list goes on. I would go so far as to say I have even found one of my new favorite authors.
This work in particular has a special place in my heart, being that my grandmother and mother have both worked through the loss of a son/brother at a formative point in my life. I felt that this book is more of a companion to an object, as well as a mirror and a safety blanket. There’s something special in the conversations of uncertainty, anguish, and learning that we get from this book.
I’m not going to forget this read any time soon.
This is one of the most beautiful memoirs I’ve ever encountered. I couldn’t ask for better writing, narration, reflection, and the list goes on. I would go so far as to say I have even found one of my new favorite authors.
This work in particular has a special place in my heart, being that my grandmother and mother have both worked through the loss of a son/brother at a formative point in my life. I felt that this book is more of a companion to an object, as well as a mirror and a safety blanket. There’s something special in the conversations of uncertainty, anguish, and learning that we get from this book.
I’m not going to forget this read any time soon.
April 15, 2024
Alexandra Fuller is one of my favorite authors. After reading all six book about her family and loving them I was eager to read her newest book describing her life after the loss of her son. Although well written as always this was my least favorite book so far. I understand her grief was bottomless but many people have to deal with grief and eventually go back to work and move on.
May 12, 2024
Aching, complex, beautiful. Her son was a few months older than my oldest and died in the way I fear I’ll lose my second. So, close to my heart, or rather, close to the deepest fears of my heart. I haven’t lost a son, but I’ve come to the edge of that abyss twice, so close—3 millimeters in one case—. I hold them tight and never forget the depths. This book offers light, that should it happen, there might be a way through.
April 7, 2024
I always love Alexandra Fuller's poetic, evocative writing, as I did in this book.
I don't want to say too much because it would make me sound like an unkind and unsympathetic person. My mom died when I was 16 and my dad died when I was 36. So I have known loss, but never the loss of a child. So I couldn't identify with the intense, debilitating grief that Fuller felt. But it kind of bothered me that she couldn't even celebrate her daughter's birthday after Fi died. Anyway, my lack of understand of this unrelenting grief kind of got in the way of my loving this book, sorry to say.
I don't want to say too much because it would make me sound like an unkind and unsympathetic person. My mom died when I was 16 and my dad died when I was 36. So I have known loss, but never the loss of a child. So I couldn't identify with the intense, debilitating grief that Fuller felt. But it kind of bothered me that she couldn't even celebrate her daughter's birthday after Fi died. Anyway, my lack of understand of this unrelenting grief kind of got in the way of my loving this book, sorry to say.
Read
May 15, 2024Notables 2024 #40
December 30, 2023
Powerful and challenging - but beautifully written as per usual with Alexandra Fuller. I felt like an extra round of edits could’ve helped as I noticed a few repetitive words/phrases. But it doesn’t take away from the power of her writing at all. AF is one of my favorite authors and I am glad she was able to turn this tragedy into something beautiful- this book
May 5, 2024
“And those universal edges --- birth, death --- they’re hard to take in completely, when they’re happening. It’s all going too fast, blood rushing to the head. Even the middling, middle bits --- stable-enough marriage, healthy kids, good income --- like the middle of a roundabout, you can think it’s all going quite manageably no matter how wildly the edges are quivering. I did; I thought I had it all under control…. And now I see, that too had been an illusion.”
In poetry like that, pain made poetic through the superpowers of a writer with profound heart and soul, FI pulls us all in.
We feel like we’re the grieving mother, the stalwart woman from Zimbabwe, the nature girl who made her toddlers walk four miles down dusty roads to get their exercise, who lived in yurts and mountainous surroundings, with rifles at her side, ready to do business with anyone, no matter how dangerous. Alexandra Fuller is the most complicated owner of so much disparate knowledge and the tools with which to express her every feeling to us. So we would never anticipate the vulnerability and raw emotion that force-feeds her travelogue --- from the sudden death of her 21-year-old son, Fi, through the grieving process and out the other side when she least expects to find herself there.
FI is a beautiful book that is not for the faint of heart. It is a strange outlier in this world of grief memoirs. Fuller puts the rest of the insane world at bay (the formidable Trump years, Brexit, climate change) while trying to separate herself from her pain yet still hang on to her connection with Fi.
There is no way to do justice to this book, a resounding HURRAH!, without sharing more of Fuller’s exquisite and hard-earned words. The author of several memoirs, including the mega bestseller DON’T LET’S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT (about her childhood in Africa), Fuller burst forth on the confessional scene armed with intelligence, wit and a way with words that brings to mind Antoine de-Saint Exupery and Beryl Markham. To join such a small line of exceptional memoirists is to be both a philosopher and a patient needing therapy, a professor and a poet, all of which Fuller clearly is.
“It’s not only that I was not ready to leave this smoke-swirling wilderness --- so still and stilling --- it was also that I couldn’t yet leave. I hadn’t done yet what I’d come here to do, whatever that was, a goalless goal. If I’d had these words then, I’d have said that this place, of all places, this burning paradise beneath the bloodred moon enabled the wildest of my grief. In this wasted, smoky, shrouded haven, I could bismillah my old self. I could protest and writhe and weep; under this veiled sun, I could endure the death of Fi’s earthly mother. I could do the big deaths here, the hardest of the work; I could accept he was gone.”
Fuller travels with a changing army of fellow mourners --- usually her two daughters, her on-again, off-again lover, Till, and various friends --- but not her own mother or sister. Her ex-husband occasionally takes their youngest daughter with him. The family splits up and gets back together, and somehow Fuller still can’t find her footing --- as the depressed mom, the abandoned child, the wilderness queen giving herself over to nature in search of a cure. Everywhere she goes, the grief goes with her.
Fuller’s journey is so deeply wrought that you will both hardly put the book down and want nothing more than to never have to read it again. But when it comes to truth of life, Fuller turns the journey back to living after the death of a beloved child into a travelogue of the senses, a bible of sorts for anyone who finds themselves in the same place. Having almost lost my son twice, I found this book to be a marvel --- a marvel of pain and purposeful self-exploration that ends with hope and love, a message to those of us not in that dreadful situation to truly carpe diem.
Reviewed by Jana Siciliano
In poetry like that, pain made poetic through the superpowers of a writer with profound heart and soul, FI pulls us all in.
We feel like we’re the grieving mother, the stalwart woman from Zimbabwe, the nature girl who made her toddlers walk four miles down dusty roads to get their exercise, who lived in yurts and mountainous surroundings, with rifles at her side, ready to do business with anyone, no matter how dangerous. Alexandra Fuller is the most complicated owner of so much disparate knowledge and the tools with which to express her every feeling to us. So we would never anticipate the vulnerability and raw emotion that force-feeds her travelogue --- from the sudden death of her 21-year-old son, Fi, through the grieving process and out the other side when she least expects to find herself there.
FI is a beautiful book that is not for the faint of heart. It is a strange outlier in this world of grief memoirs. Fuller puts the rest of the insane world at bay (the formidable Trump years, Brexit, climate change) while trying to separate herself from her pain yet still hang on to her connection with Fi.
There is no way to do justice to this book, a resounding HURRAH!, without sharing more of Fuller’s exquisite and hard-earned words. The author of several memoirs, including the mega bestseller DON’T LET’S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT (about her childhood in Africa), Fuller burst forth on the confessional scene armed with intelligence, wit and a way with words that brings to mind Antoine de-Saint Exupery and Beryl Markham. To join such a small line of exceptional memoirists is to be both a philosopher and a patient needing therapy, a professor and a poet, all of which Fuller clearly is.
“It’s not only that I was not ready to leave this smoke-swirling wilderness --- so still and stilling --- it was also that I couldn’t yet leave. I hadn’t done yet what I’d come here to do, whatever that was, a goalless goal. If I’d had these words then, I’d have said that this place, of all places, this burning paradise beneath the bloodred moon enabled the wildest of my grief. In this wasted, smoky, shrouded haven, I could bismillah my old self. I could protest and writhe and weep; under this veiled sun, I could endure the death of Fi’s earthly mother. I could do the big deaths here, the hardest of the work; I could accept he was gone.”
Fuller travels with a changing army of fellow mourners --- usually her two daughters, her on-again, off-again lover, Till, and various friends --- but not her own mother or sister. Her ex-husband occasionally takes their youngest daughter with him. The family splits up and gets back together, and somehow Fuller still can’t find her footing --- as the depressed mom, the abandoned child, the wilderness queen giving herself over to nature in search of a cure. Everywhere she goes, the grief goes with her.
Fuller’s journey is so deeply wrought that you will both hardly put the book down and want nothing more than to never have to read it again. But when it comes to truth of life, Fuller turns the journey back to living after the death of a beloved child into a travelogue of the senses, a bible of sorts for anyone who finds themselves in the same place. Having almost lost my son twice, I found this book to be a marvel --- a marvel of pain and purposeful self-exploration that ends with hope and love, a message to those of us not in that dreadful situation to truly carpe diem.
Reviewed by Jana Siciliano
March 27, 2024
I won a paperback uncorrected edition of the book. I had never heard of Alexandra fuller before reading the book.
One thing I learned about that I had never heard of before is a sheep wagon that shepherds live in.
I thought it was a very interesting account of her trying to make it through the loss of her son FI. I learned about her childhood in Zimbabwe, mother, father, sister, and I think she even had brothers. And also she talks about her extended family, her Ex husband Charlie, her daughters Sarah and Cecily, her friend Till.
One thing I remember from the book is she had a horse accident when she was younger and her parents had to driver her to the hospital carrying guns and with a police escort.
For me most of Fi kept me interested and wanting to keep reading. Though I did feel sad after having read it. I don't think I have ever read a book about someone losing a son when he was so young.
One thing I learned about that I had never heard of before is a sheep wagon that shepherds live in.
I thought it was a very interesting account of her trying to make it through the loss of her son FI. I learned about her childhood in Zimbabwe, mother, father, sister, and I think she even had brothers. And also she talks about her extended family, her Ex husband Charlie, her daughters Sarah and Cecily, her friend Till.
One thing I remember from the book is she had a horse accident when she was younger and her parents had to driver her to the hospital carrying guns and with a police escort.
For me most of Fi kept me interested and wanting to keep reading. Though I did feel sad after having read it. I don't think I have ever read a book about someone losing a son when he was so young.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 14, 2024
My favorite author has written yet another masterpiece so beautiful, honest, gut wrenching and raw, it took my breath away. As a mother your worst fear is something happening to your children. You can’t fathom a life without them. I felt this memoir in my bones and in my soul, though I know her eloquence and erudition would escape me completely during a tragedy like this. I would simply retreat to a dark work unable to comprehend my loss and slowly marinate in my own grief. Being able to articulate and share that grief at your lowest most vulnerable point is a rare gift. There’s beauty in being able to turn your pain into an inspirational journey for others to read and ponder. I loved this book and can’t recommend it enough.
May 4, 2024
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by this author is probably one of my top five memoirs of all time and my favorite writing by this author. But I found myself skim-reading Fi. Though there were tender reflections on her playful and strong philosophy of parenting, deep friendships, clever writing, and heartbreaking journey the book is (understandably) hyper-focused on the grief of losing her son as a young adult. Weaves in her childhood in South Africa and all the people and rituals that got her through the first months and year…but also kind of incoherent and almost microscopically specific details…
April 17, 2024
Though it is impossible for Alexandra Fuller to write badly, I ended up just skimming this book which tells the story of the sudden, unexpected death of her son. She goes into more detail about the psychological residue of her childhood, her failed marriage, her estrangement from her mother and sister - it had to come after the years of alcohol and madness. But grief is so intensely personal that it is hard to make it interesting to others and maybe having just read one of her books I didn't need any more of the same.
May 8, 2024
I can’t quit this author. Though I have no earthly connection to any of her life experiences, she writes with such emotional honesty and humanity that I come back to her again and again. Here, she writes a grief narrative about the sudden death of her beautiful child, her just-out-of-adolescence son, with his whole life ahead of him. She exquisitely captures her grief and also her two younger daughters’ grief over the loss of their beloved brother: their sibling trio reduced to a duet.
May 16, 2024
A memoir about grief, a lovely history of a beloved boy, and an exploration of how to heal and told by a wonderful author and storyteller. Alexandra Fuller is a very experienced, passionate and idiosyncratic person and she tells a great story while and about her grieving and that of her family. Sometimes not a happy tale, but very frequently a great learning story and always a captivating experience.
March 25, 2024
Fi is the nickname of Alexandra Fuller's son, Fuller, who died unexpectedly at a young age. This book is the story of how the author navigated the grief of losing him. At times it's funny and irreverent, at times the pain and grief are palpable and raw, and at all times, the writing is beautiful and emotional. A powerful memoir.
May 4, 2024
WOW. The reader MUST know that this is a memoir about a young adult dying, the son of the writer. it is HEART WRENCHING. And her writing is some of the best I’ve read about grief. She is so raw in her writing. She moves through grief by connecting with her natural world and I could’ve kept reading forever, despite how deeply deeply sad and personal this is. Hold your kids tight.
April 18, 2024
How does one grieve the worst loss possible. Everyone grieves differently. Love. Support. Reflection. I think the advise to go away from everyone that if knows your loss is good advice. Hawaii.. Do whatever you need to do.
May 3, 2024
Fi is an absolutely beautiful and heartbreaking memoir about the death of her 21 year old son. Every single page is an amazement! The NY Times blurb on the back of the book says it all-" Whew boy, can Alexandra Fuller write."
May 5, 2024
Alexandra Fuller is an amazing writer and this was a really moving tribute to all her children, but especially her late son. After his sudden death, Fuller struggles to make sense of the world and her place in it, and it makes a very moving read.
May 8, 2024
4.5 Fuller lost her son at age 21. I consider myself somewhat brave reading this so soon after the death of my daughter, but that is how I cope. I find it helpful to read about someone in my same situation.
A beautifully written, extremely touching look at grief.
A beautifully written, extremely touching look at grief.
May 12, 2024
Absolutely heartbreaking and hopeful at the same time. I adore Fuller as a writer, and believe her description of her grief journey after the death of her son is as poignantly written as anything I have ever read.
Read
May 15, 2024She’s a compelling writer and reader. A difficult subject but I went along with her journey of experiencing grief for her son.
I do find it strange that she didn’t want to know the cause of his death.
I do find it strange that she didn’t want to know the cause of his death.
May 16, 2024
So good. I slowed down halfway through because I didn't want it to be over. Finishing this book feels like putting an old friend back on the plane, not knowing when they'll visit again or what stories and experiences they'll bring next time. I'm so sad it's over.
April 14, 2024
Sending you peace, AF.
April 16, 2024
Impossible to imagine, the loss of a child. How do you live the rest of your life?
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April 18, 2024I have read all her memoirs and this one is the saddest of all. Fi was young and to come to turns that you have outlived your child is extremely difficult.
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