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, 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.
Fuller leaves nothing under the table, under the rug or under wraps ... The last thing you expect to do when you read a book about a child dying is to laugh ... The wit in this memoir is soul-piercing ... Fuller is sagacious and perspicacious. She is a sublime writer. In the hands of another memoirist, the story of Fi might be unbearably sad, but this book is 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.
A book that is as hard to pick up as it is to put down — a gutting, terrifying, profound and defiantly enthralling read ... By its end, I was moved and devastated yet somehow strengthened.
A seductive read about unrelenting agony. Self-effacing, wise and dry, the author’s style may be described as "frenetic lyric" ... In this finely observed account of her breakage and imperfect repair, Ms. Fuller describes the state of her life after Fi’s death.
