Review: Vivien Horler
Fi, by Alexandra Fuller (Jonathan Cape)
In July 2018 times were rough for acclaimed author Alexandra Fuller. Her marriage was over, and so was the relationship with a glassblower with whom she had lived in a yurt in a Wyoming meadow.
Now she was moving into a tiny and stuffy condo which was all she could afford.
She was also breaking up with a young woman, Till, whom she described as “a severe weather advisory of her own” involving drugs and depression.
Her beloved father had recently died, and she was estranged from her mother and sister, because of things she had written about them in previous memoirs. She also longed for the country of her birth, Zimbabwe, the wild and war-torn country she had known as a child
But on the plus side, there was her confidence in her own agency and options, and joy centred on her three children, Sarah and Fuller, who were at college, and Cecily who was still at school.
She was a loving but no-nonsense mother with zero tolerance for sulking. She also expected her children to walk: “After their fourth birthdays and until they could outwalk me, I’d expected my children to be able to walk their age in miles – not daily but when needed – at roughly my pace, no whining, no stopping every two seconds for a snack or water.”
Her mother had lost three children, one a toddler a very young Alexandra was meant to be looking after when she drowned. Fuller’s mother too was a no-nonsense person, but also a neurotic and a passionate drinker.
Fuller writes, in the context of her mother: “People have always told me that I should understand this; when a mother loses a child, her surviving children lose a mother.”
And then, coming back into signal after a country trip with Till, her phone pinged with messages and calls from Charlie, her former husband. Fuller, known as Fi, had died. His heart stopped in his sleep.
As a small boy Fuller would say: “Fi, to rhyme with tree, to rhyme with tea, to rhyme with me.”
Fuller – the author – writes: “For me, everything had been planned. Certainty had been an entitlement… But I never thought life would serve me up something that could stop me dead.”
It was not just her own agony that caught Fuller short – it was also that of her daughters. Sarah and Fi had been especially close, and Cecily had adored her big brother.
Friends and family rallied around although, notably and extraordinarily, neither her mother or her sister. Not a word.
How to cope? Fuller wanted to know where Fi had gone. “Fi had left the limits of my understanding, and now finding him had become everything to me.”
Fuller had been baptised Anglican, but the church, despite its rituals, offered her no comfort. The reassurance of the presence of ancestors, similar to local beliefs in both Zimbabwe and among Native Americans, seemed a bit more hopeful.
The gift of a sunshine beach holiday in Hawaii, where Fuller heard her daughters laugh out loud for the first time since Fi’s death, helped. Weeks spent in a wagon deep in the loneliness of Wyoming’s mountains – sometimes in Till’s company – helped too.
Then there was a grief sanctuary in New Mexico and – to me – a terrifying silent meditation retreat in Canada: 10 days of silence, 14 hours of meditation a day, no talking, no eye contact, no eating after noon, no phones, no reading or writing, no exercise…
Fuller felt like a pupa, becoming a moth. And she moved on. She bought a smallholding in Idaho, on the other side of the mountains from Wyoming, she acquired a puppy.
She writes: “And I will be as a mountain, slicing through the clouds; let the weather come… I will stand.”
Such courage, such inspiration.
Lovely review. I want to read this book.