“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.... 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."

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.