Fi: A Memoir of My Son

From the award-winning New York Times-bestsellingauthor of Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller, comes acareer defining memoir about grieving the sudden loss of hertwenty-one-year-old child "Fair to say,I was in a ribald state the summer before my fiftieth birthday." And so beginsAlexandra Fuller's open, vivid new memoir, Fi. It's midsummer in Wyoming andAlexandra is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her homecountry of Zimbabwe, reeling from a midlife breakup, freshly sober and piecingher way uncertainly through a volatile new relationship with a younger woman,Alexandra vows to get herself back on even keel. Andthen--suddenly and incomprehensibly--her son Fi, at twenty-one years old, dies inhis sleep. No strangerto loss--young siblings, a parent, a home country-- Alexandra is nonethelessleveled. At the same time, she is painfully aware that she cannot succumb andabandon her two surviving daughters as her mother before her had done. From asheep wagon deep in the mountains of Wyoming to a grief sanctuary in New Mexicoto a silent meditation retreat in Alberta, Canada, Alexandra journeys up anddown the spine of the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to find how to grieveherself 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 asa child in Zimbabwe. By turns disarming, devastating and unexpectedly,blessedly funny, Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grievinga child in a culture that has no instructions for it.