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Leaving before the rains came
The New York Times Bestseller from the author of Travel Light, Move Fast
"One of the gutsiest memoirs I've ever read. And the writing--oh my god the writing ."— Entertainment Weekly
A child of the Rhodesian wars and daughter of two deeply complicated parents, Alexandra Fuller is no stranger to pain. But the disintegration of Fuller’s own marriage leaves her shattered. Looking to pick up the pieces of her life, she finally confronts the tough questions about her past, about the American man she married, and about the family she left behind in Africa. A breathtaking achievement, Leaving Before the Rains Come is a memoir of such grace and intelligence, filled with such wit and courage, that it could only have been written by Alexandra Fuller.
Leaving Before the Rains Come begins with the dreadful first years of the American financial crisis when Fuller’s delicate balance—between American pragmatism and African fatalism, the linchpin of her unorthodox marriage—irrevocably fails. Recalling her unusual courtship in Zambia—elephant attacks on the first date, sick with malaria on the wedding day—Fuller struggles to understand her younger self as she overcomes her current misfortunes. Fuller soon realizes what is missing from her life is something that was always the brash and uncompromising ways of her father, the man who warned his daughter that "the problem with most people is that they want to be alive for as long as possible without having any idea whatsoever how to live." Fuller’s father—"Tim Fuller of No Fixed Abode" as he first introduced himself to his future wife—was a man who regretted nothing and wanted less, even after fighting harder and losing more than most men could bear.
Leaving Before the Rains Come showcases Fuller at the peak of her abilities, threading panoramic vistas with her deepest revelations as a fully grown woman and mother. Fuller reveals how, after spending a lifetime fearfully waiting for someone to show up and save her, she discovered that, in the end, we all simply have to save ourselves.
An unforgettable book, Leaving Before the Rains Come is a story of sorrow grounded in the tragic grandeur and rueful joy only to be found in Fuller’s Africa.
"One of the gutsiest memoirs I've ever read. And the writing--oh my god the writing ."— Entertainment Weekly
A child of the Rhodesian wars and daughter of two deeply complicated parents, Alexandra Fuller is no stranger to pain. But the disintegration of Fuller’s own marriage leaves her shattered. Looking to pick up the pieces of her life, she finally confronts the tough questions about her past, about the American man she married, and about the family she left behind in Africa. A breathtaking achievement, Leaving Before the Rains Come is a memoir of such grace and intelligence, filled with such wit and courage, that it could only have been written by Alexandra Fuller.
Leaving Before the Rains Come begins with the dreadful first years of the American financial crisis when Fuller’s delicate balance—between American pragmatism and African fatalism, the linchpin of her unorthodox marriage—irrevocably fails. Recalling her unusual courtship in Zambia—elephant attacks on the first date, sick with malaria on the wedding day—Fuller struggles to understand her younger self as she overcomes her current misfortunes. Fuller soon realizes what is missing from her life is something that was always the brash and uncompromising ways of her father, the man who warned his daughter that "the problem with most people is that they want to be alive for as long as possible without having any idea whatsoever how to live." Fuller’s father—"Tim Fuller of No Fixed Abode" as he first introduced himself to his future wife—was a man who regretted nothing and wanted less, even after fighting harder and losing more than most men could bear.
Leaving Before the Rains Come showcases Fuller at the peak of her abilities, threading panoramic vistas with her deepest revelations as a fully grown woman and mother. Fuller reveals how, after spending a lifetime fearfully waiting for someone to show up and save her, she discovered that, in the end, we all simply have to save ourselves.
An unforgettable book, Leaving Before the Rains Come is a story of sorrow grounded in the tragic grandeur and rueful joy only to be found in Fuller’s Africa.
Unknown Binding
First published October 31, 2012
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About the author
Alexandra Fuller
16 books1,131 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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February 10, 2015
Early in Leaving Before The Rains Come, Alexandra Fuller recalls a Q&A session that followed a reading she gave in Dallas in 2010. An audience member asked her, “Do you consider yourself African?”
Fuller notes that the writer with whom she shared the stage, a woman she does not identify by name but describes her so that we know it is Nigerian author and activist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, would never have been asked this question. That is because Alexandra Fuller, of English and Scottish descent, is white.
In a memoir of heartbreak and endings, of confusion and lost dreams, this may be the saddest moment for me. It seems to encapsulate all that Alexandra Fuller has lost in her bold and astonishing life: her country, her family, her way.
Alexandra Fuller’s 2002 memoir of her childhood in southern Africa, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, is one of the most evocative I’ve read. The follow-up, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, delves into Fuller’s mother’s life—and her father’s, after this irrepressible couple meet and marry and take on southern Africa—a story less touching perhaps, but no less fascinating. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight ends on Fuller’s wedding day. She is twenty-two, feverish with malaria, and helplessly in love with American Charlie Ross, an adventure guide ten years her senior.
The moment I learned that Alexandra Fuller had written a new installment in her exploration of self and family, I got in line. I’d fallen hard for her fearless, beautiful writing. Her family’s stoic humor in the face of disaster amazed me, their flaws and eccentricities charmed.
The initial chapters of Leaving Before The Rains Come make for awkward reading if you are not familiar with the Fullers and their life in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Zambia; the references to past events are delivered with a kind of insider’s shorthand. It isn’t until Fuller reaches to the point of denying her Africanness at the reading in Texas that she approaches the book’s central theme: her failing marriage.
Although Fuller recounts stories from her family’s unique past to color in the lines of her present, this memoir is really about a woman, alone and disconnected.
Fuller gently probes at the reasons why her marriage became intractable. She is careful not to assign blame and she is protectively oblique about her children, now young adults. Charlie seems to offer the best of both hemispheres that pull at Alexandra: he understands her smoldering love for Africa, yet his very Americanness represents the stability she craves. He is older, sober, a man with a plan: “Charlie didn’t burn through the present, or drown it out, or wash up against it, because his past had left him intact. He had a future to look forward to.” After the difficult birth of their first child and a near-fatal bout of malaria for Fuller a year into their marriage, Alexandra and Charlie leave Africa for the American West. There they buy land, build a house—first in Idaho, then in Wyoming. Charlie starts a whitewater river guide business and Fuller begins to write.
But as we learn later, the marriage began to disintegrate early. As in that first year, early. Yet, two more children and nineteen more years of marriage follow. In their first decade together, Fuller writes nine novels that are rejected before she finds her way with Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. Charlie Ross sets aside his adventure guiding to sell real estate, a move that fits his description of “someone who wasn’t a stranger to adventure, but yet who was not unpredictably, superfluously dangerous” yet disappoints Fuller all the same. She married whitewater river rapids, not a Century 21 gold jacket.
This change of career isn’t what makes the marriage fail. There is a ranch, a house, animals, and three children to provide for. (Fuller’s writing career takes off, but if ever there was evidence that a successful book, even two, do not equal financial freedom, Fuller’s cautionary tale is it). There is financial stress and a natural lessening of passion as the demands of family take over, but Fuller reaches for a deeper reason. She identifies a profound incompatibility that harkens back to how being raised in Africa, in her very particular family, has shaped her psyche.
Just as she is poised to make the break, disaster strikes. Charlie is crushed beneath a horse and comes within a hair’s breadth of death. Alexandra Fuller stays with her husband through his recovery, but in the end, they end.
Fuller reflects painfully on all the reasons why she and Charlie grew apart or never should have been together in the first place, but none struck me as insurmountable. Except—and this is at the heart of all Alexandra Fuller’s eloquent, spirited and raw writing—her sense of being misplaced. Her cultural displacement is a rift of the soul that she is ever in search of healing.
I am Alexandra Fuller’s age. We married at the same time, to men who made our knees weak, who were both solid rocks of self-possession and stability. But how and why my marriage has withstood all the earthquakes large and small while another’s failed is impossible to say and unfair to speculate. As the author poignantly states,
3 1/2 stars
Fuller notes that the writer with whom she shared the stage, a woman she does not identify by name but describes her so that we know it is Nigerian author and activist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, would never have been asked this question. That is because Alexandra Fuller, of English and Scottish descent, is white.
Did I consider myself African? The truth is, I longed to say, “Yes,” as I had years ago. Even, defensively, “Of course, yes.” I longed to have an identity so solid, so obvious, and so unassailable that I, or anyone else, could dig all the way back into it for generations and generations and find nothing but more and further proof of the bedrock of my Africanness.
I said, “Not anymore. Not especially.”
In a memoir of heartbreak and endings, of confusion and lost dreams, this may be the saddest moment for me. It seems to encapsulate all that Alexandra Fuller has lost in her bold and astonishing life: her country, her family, her way.
Alexandra Fuller’s 2002 memoir of her childhood in southern Africa, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, is one of the most evocative I’ve read. The follow-up, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, delves into Fuller’s mother’s life—and her father’s, after this irrepressible couple meet and marry and take on southern Africa—a story less touching perhaps, but no less fascinating. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight ends on Fuller’s wedding day. She is twenty-two, feverish with malaria, and helplessly in love with American Charlie Ross, an adventure guide ten years her senior.
The moment I learned that Alexandra Fuller had written a new installment in her exploration of self and family, I got in line. I’d fallen hard for her fearless, beautiful writing. Her family’s stoic humor in the face of disaster amazed me, their flaws and eccentricities charmed.
The initial chapters of Leaving Before The Rains Come make for awkward reading if you are not familiar with the Fullers and their life in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Zambia; the references to past events are delivered with a kind of insider’s shorthand. It isn’t until Fuller reaches to the point of denying her Africanness at the reading in Texas that she approaches the book’s central theme: her failing marriage.
Although Fuller recounts stories from her family’s unique past to color in the lines of her present, this memoir is really about a woman, alone and disconnected.
Fuller gently probes at the reasons why her marriage became intractable. She is careful not to assign blame and she is protectively oblique about her children, now young adults. Charlie seems to offer the best of both hemispheres that pull at Alexandra: he understands her smoldering love for Africa, yet his very Americanness represents the stability she craves. He is older, sober, a man with a plan: “Charlie didn’t burn through the present, or drown it out, or wash up against it, because his past had left him intact. He had a future to look forward to.” After the difficult birth of their first child and a near-fatal bout of malaria for Fuller a year into their marriage, Alexandra and Charlie leave Africa for the American West. There they buy land, build a house—first in Idaho, then in Wyoming. Charlie starts a whitewater river guide business and Fuller begins to write.
But as we learn later, the marriage began to disintegrate early. As in that first year, early. Yet, two more children and nineteen more years of marriage follow. In their first decade together, Fuller writes nine novels that are rejected before she finds her way with Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. Charlie Ross sets aside his adventure guiding to sell real estate, a move that fits his description of “someone who wasn’t a stranger to adventure, but yet who was not unpredictably, superfluously dangerous” yet disappoints Fuller all the same. She married whitewater river rapids, not a Century 21 gold jacket.
This change of career isn’t what makes the marriage fail. There is a ranch, a house, animals, and three children to provide for. (Fuller’s writing career takes off, but if ever there was evidence that a successful book, even two, do not equal financial freedom, Fuller’s cautionary tale is it). There is financial stress and a natural lessening of passion as the demands of family take over, but Fuller reaches for a deeper reason. She identifies a profound incompatibility that harkens back to how being raised in Africa, in her very particular family, has shaped her psyche.
In Africa, we filled up all available time busily doing not much, and then we wasted the rest.” But in America “there seemed to be so little of it, and its unaccustomed short supply panicked me in grocery checkout lines, during meals, and at traffic lights … Of course, I changed and sped up.Even in Wyoming—which reminds her of the natural, savage beauty she left behind—away from the city, at peace with animals and adored children, Fuller can’t escape the sense that she is losing herself.
Just as she is poised to make the break, disaster strikes. Charlie is crushed beneath a horse and comes within a hair’s breadth of death. Alexandra Fuller stays with her husband through his recovery, but in the end, they end.
Fuller reflects painfully on all the reasons why she and Charlie grew apart or never should have been together in the first place, but none struck me as insurmountable. Except—and this is at the heart of all Alexandra Fuller’s eloquent, spirited and raw writing—her sense of being misplaced. Her cultural displacement is a rift of the soul that she is ever in search of healing.
I am Alexandra Fuller’s age. We married at the same time, to men who made our knees weak, who were both solid rocks of self-possession and stability. But how and why my marriage has withstood all the earthquakes large and small while another’s failed is impossible to say and unfair to speculate. As the author poignantly states,
It’s not anyone’s job to make another person happy, but the truth is, people can either be very happy or very unhappy together. Happiness or unhappiness isn’t a measure of their love. You can have an intense connection to someone without being a good lifelong mate for him. Love is complicated and difficult that way.
3 1/2 stars
August 17, 2016
When Alexandra Fuller was a little girl, her father told her, “The problem with most people is that they want to be alive for as long as possible without having any idea whatsoever how to live.”
Well, based on this memoir – luminously written and so compelling I didn’t want to come up for breath – this author has truly lived. There has been pain, yes, but also incandescent moments and adventures that the vast majority of people never get to experience. And Alexandra Fuller captures it all so well that I’m left wondering how it is that I’ve never read anything by her before.
“Africa has been my primarily relationship for most of my life, defining, sustaining, and unequivocal in a way that no human relationship had ever been…,” Ms. Fuller writes. When she leaves it, she feels that an essential connection with this earth has become forever detached “ like a soulless body or a heartless lover.”
In loving yet incredibly perceptive prose, Ms. Fuller showcases growing up in a chaotic and often fatalistic home. (She says of her parents: “Together they had lost three children, a war, a few farms, and for a while my mother had seriously lost her mind.”) She is mesmerized by Charlie Ross, an American who has launched a rafting and canoe company in Zambia, and who promises to be every bit as adventurous and risk-taking as she is.
Yet the two of them – both of come from highly unorthodox and complicated families – have a mismatched view of the world. His is shaped by American pragmatism and hers is honed by the unpredictability of life. The author writes, “We had glommed onto one another in happy unconscious relief, as if the inherited and accumulated wounds in each of us had recognized their matches, their balms, and their ends.” Yet neither of them is capable of reaching beyond themselves to truly reach the other.
This is a brutally honest memoir and a courageous one; Alexandra Fuller does not cast blame as her marriage dissipates and owns her own contribution to the marriage’s dissolution. It’s a book interspersed with poignancy and wit, with perception and intelligence, and the courage of self-examination. I’d count it among the finest memoirs I’ve read.
Well, based on this memoir – luminously written and so compelling I didn’t want to come up for breath – this author has truly lived. There has been pain, yes, but also incandescent moments and adventures that the vast majority of people never get to experience. And Alexandra Fuller captures it all so well that I’m left wondering how it is that I’ve never read anything by her before.
“Africa has been my primarily relationship for most of my life, defining, sustaining, and unequivocal in a way that no human relationship had ever been…,” Ms. Fuller writes. When she leaves it, she feels that an essential connection with this earth has become forever detached “ like a soulless body or a heartless lover.”
In loving yet incredibly perceptive prose, Ms. Fuller showcases growing up in a chaotic and often fatalistic home. (She says of her parents: “Together they had lost three children, a war, a few farms, and for a while my mother had seriously lost her mind.”) She is mesmerized by Charlie Ross, an American who has launched a rafting and canoe company in Zambia, and who promises to be every bit as adventurous and risk-taking as she is.
Yet the two of them – both of come from highly unorthodox and complicated families – have a mismatched view of the world. His is shaped by American pragmatism and hers is honed by the unpredictability of life. The author writes, “We had glommed onto one another in happy unconscious relief, as if the inherited and accumulated wounds in each of us had recognized their matches, their balms, and their ends.” Yet neither of them is capable of reaching beyond themselves to truly reach the other.
This is a brutally honest memoir and a courageous one; Alexandra Fuller does not cast blame as her marriage dissipates and owns her own contribution to the marriage’s dissolution. It’s a book interspersed with poignancy and wit, with perception and intelligence, and the courage of self-examination. I’d count it among the finest memoirs I’ve read.
February 10, 2015
From the book blurb:
A child of the Rhodesian wars and daughter of two deeply complicated parents, Alexandra Fuller is no stranger to pain. But the disintegration of Fuller’s own marriage leaves her shattered. Looking to pick up the pieces of her life, she finally confronts the tough questions about her past, about the American man she married, and about the family she left behind in Africa. A breathtaking achievement, Leaving Before the Rains Come is a memoir of such grace and intelligence, filled with such wit and courage, that it could only have been written by Alexandra Fuller."
Alexandra Fuller captured the imagination with her books, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight , and Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness in which she wrote non-fictional memories of her parents and childhood in Africa. Rhodesia (now Zimababwe) and Zambia (previously known as northern Rhodesia), as well as Malawi, played a primary role in her family's lives. In this latest publication, Leaving before the rain comes she revisits her childhood, as a sequel, in an effort to understand her current life as a single, divorced parent in America. She tries to understand why her marriage did not last. Why her dreams did not pan out as she was hoping for. To create stability for her children, she first needed to take care of herself and not expect others to do so. First it was God, then her father, then Charles. In the end, she needed to discover her own strengths and weaknesses to stand on her own feet. And this is the central theme of this latest memoir.
As with her previous two books, the author remains true to her own exotic (to Americans) witty, quirky, self. She takes the reader to her Africa, but this time focuses on her own experiences and not those of her eccentric parents as was the main focus in the previous chronicles.
In her previous book "Cocktail Hour Under The Tree of Forgetfulness" , she introduces her dad like this: "
".... although my father is profoundly English, by the time I am old enough to know anything about him, he is already fighting in an African war and his Englishness has been subdued by more than a decade on this uncompromising continent. In this way, the English part of our identity registers as a void, something lacking that manifests in inherited, stereotypical characteristics: an allergy to sentimentality, a casual ease with profanity, a horror of bad manners, a deep mistrust of humorlessness. It is my need to add layers and context to the outline of this sketchy Englishness..."The previous books had so many readers falling in love with her parents, your truly included, and her mother was certainly one of the most outstanding characters to meet through her eloquent ode to their farm and life in southern Africa.
But it was never fun. Their sense of humor often hid the terrible experiences she related of the terror and trauma of the African liberation struggle. One of the most outstanding thoughts from her previous book, which inspired me to read her latest memoir, was this:
"But you can't have all this life on one end without a corresponding amount of decay on the other: in the morning my parent's maid, Hilda Tembo ( "Big H" to the family), will sweep up half a bucket of insects carcasses and two gecko bodies from under the Tree of Forgetfulness. Months from now three of the Jack Russels will have been killed by a cobra in Dad's office, and one will have been eaten by a crocodile in Mum's fish ponds. And Dad will walk out of the bedroom one morning to see a python coiled in cartoonish perfection around Wallace ( the late cat). "You learn not to mourn every little thing out there," Mom says. She shakes her head. "No, you can't, or you'd never, ever stop grieving.Alexandra Fuller has a talent to write. She has a talent to tell her story. Although it is important to her to use name-dropping in a sense, to justify the tale, or pressing her 'important' bloodlines onto the reader, the story in itself, of their hardships and horrors in Africa, as British settlers, could have stood on its own feet, simply because their tale is relevant to thousands of other people who had to flee Africa under similar circumstances.
What my mother won't say - lost in all her talk of chemicals and pills - is that she knows not only the route grief takes through the blood but also the route it takes through the heart's cracks. What she won't tell me is that recovering from the madness of grief wasn't just a matter of prescriptions, but of willpower. " I sometimes used to envy the people you see running up and down the Kafue Road in hessian sacks," she said once. And it is true that Mum seriously considered that level of deep, irretrievable insanity an option. But instead, she took a different route and regained herself and that had very little to do with forgiveness: she forgave the world and her mind returned. She gave herself amnesty and her soul had a home again. The forgiveness took years and it took this farm and it took the Tree of Forgetfulness. It took all of that, but above all it took the one grief could never steal from my mother: her courage.""
What makes her story different, is the way she is telling it. Unique, kind, honest and witty.
No one had written much about us or made movies about our adventures, in part because there was no beginning or end to our undertakings, no way of knowing the arc of our narratives. We were less the authors of deliberate derring-do than victims of cosmic accidents,By jumping here and there in the book,the narrative becomes much more than the usual chronological memoir. It becomes a gripping tale of people facing challenges while loving and losing dreams, family members, and often hope. Settling down in a new country, with a totally different culture than the one she grew up with, becomes a challenge for her in more ways than one. She has a hard time defining herself, or her roots.
political mishaps, mistaken identities...
I was accidentally British, incidentally European— a coincidence of so many couplings. But I was deliberately southern African.Yet, she did not relate to Thabo Mbeki's expression : "I am an African." She explains why in the book.
At the age of twenty two she marries Charles Ross from Wyoming. "What I never would have confessed was the truth: at twenty-two, I was already exhausted, onto Charlie’s broad- shouldered frame was an embellished biography that made him both my sanctuary and saviour." He was the epitome of everything she always hoped for herself and never received. She just did not know the rules of the game, and it would take her twenty years of marriage to figure it out. Her Africa did not exist anymore, but her childhood experiences of war, strive, unrest, survival and perseverance prepared her for this journey she had to take on.
The book does not relate the actual reasons for the broken home her children have to face. It often created confusion. Since it is a memoir, and her intention is clearly not to embarrass or hurt anyone, some of the details that could have turned the book into a deeper experience for readers did not surface. Emotions are not fully explored, yet it can be detected in the unspoken words.
Nevertheless, the prose is Fuller-perfect, the humor is still there, the honesty brutal and delightful. I remain a staunch admirer of this author's writing. She truly has a special way of doing so. I do recommend though, that her other two books, mentioned above, are read in conjunction with this one. Not many authors can combine tragedy with laughter in quite this way.
I want to thank Netgalley and Penguin Books for the opportunity to review this book. I was a joyous reunion with the Fuller family.
February 2, 2015
I hate giving this book such a low rating because the writing is really good. I really liked her first autobiography but this one just fell flat. By the end of the book, I just did not care what happened to her. She just comes across as very shallow and uncaring. Maybe it was because of her upbringing but, like I said, I didn't care anymore.
June 8, 2018
(4.5) Fuller’s
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
is an exceptional memoir of an African childhood. Her parents were indomitable settlers, and the household felt jolly despite war, the loss of two children, alcoholism and mental illness. This poignant sequel is a portrait of Fuller’s two-decade marriage, from its hopeful beginnings to its acrimonious end. “Charlie was a gallant one-man intervention wanting to save us from our recklessness,” a hunky American outdoorsman who whisked her off to Wyoming and promised to be “both my sanctuary and my savior.” What went wrong? Nothing in particular, and everything at once: careers, money, three children. But mostly they’d stopped really seeing each other and supporting each other on a mutual journey. It had become a competition for attention and proper performance.
The last three chapters are just incredible: for a while it looks like the marriage might be lost not to divorce but to the death of one of the partners. It’s a welcome change of pace. But what I most appreciated about the book was Fuller’s sense of being displaced: she no longer feels African, but nor does she feel American; “our toughness, our humor, our hardiness—these didn’t translate easily in a culture that had made comfort the primary goal.” Working in the history of Charlie’s ancestor, Charley Ross, whose kidnapping was never solved, Fuller remarks that “In the West, it was believed that attitude and ambition saved you. In Africa, we had learned no one was immune to capricious tragedy.” The breakdown of her marriage is an everyday tragedy and a reminder that the promised fairytales rarely come true.
Fuller’s father gets some of the last lines in the book, including the one the title comes from:
[My weirdest book serendipity yet: I was reading this at the same time as W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil; in both a character mistakes pregnancy for cholera.]
The last three chapters are just incredible: for a while it looks like the marriage might be lost not to divorce but to the death of one of the partners. It’s a welcome change of pace. But what I most appreciated about the book was Fuller’s sense of being displaced: she no longer feels African, but nor does she feel American; “our toughness, our humor, our hardiness—these didn’t translate easily in a culture that had made comfort the primary goal.” Working in the history of Charlie’s ancestor, Charley Ross, whose kidnapping was never solved, Fuller remarks that “In the West, it was believed that attitude and ambition saved you. In Africa, we had learned no one was immune to capricious tragedy.” The breakdown of her marriage is an everyday tragedy and a reminder that the promised fairytales rarely come true.
Fuller’s father gets some of the last lines in the book, including the one the title comes from:
“You always think there will be more time and then suddenly there isn’t. You know how it is. You have to leave before the rains come, or it’s too late. … Easy is just another way of knowing you aren’t doing much in the way of your life. … I should have probably warned you from the start. Living your own life can be bloody frightening, and you will be lost half of the time. But if I had told you that, you might not have set out in the first place, and that would have been a terrible waste.”
[My weirdest book serendipity yet: I was reading this at the same time as W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil; in both a character mistakes pregnancy for cholera.]
November 30, 2014
Having read several of her previous books, I jumped at the chance to read Alexandra Fuller's newest memoir. I have heard it said that a writer must have something to say and be able to say it well.Ms. Fuller has both in spades. This book is an account of the dissolution of her marriage, but it is laced with more tales of her unusual childhood in the last days of Rhodesia, as it violently morphed into Zimbabwe, and of her eccentric family. Into this world, her handsome, rational husband, Charlie Ross, seemed a sort of lifeboat out of chaos and into security. After the birth of their first child, they left Africa behind and began a conventional sort of life in the USA, with a mortgage, bills, and two more children. Ms. Fuller wanted it to work, she tried to make it work, but somehow she felt herself sinking, subsumed into another personality, no longer able to really be herself. The very security her husband seemed to offer bumped up against the sort of freewheeling life she had lived in Africa. Always, her father's pithy, understated remarks pull her back to the core of the life she knows she has lost by being in her marriage. I read this book in galley form (provided by Penguin First to Read); it will be published in January 2015. I know I can't quote from a galley, lest changes are made to the text, but there were so many spots I would have underlined in a conventional bound book. This is beautiful, thoughtful writing at its best. Ms. Fuller's is a human spirit unfolded to us in the most lovely prose. Highly recommended.
September 21, 2015
Alexandra Fuller has made a writing career based on her family history, with this being the third instalment. As interesting as Fuller's family really is, she is obviously running out of material and is ranging farther afield for filler, including anecdotal information from both her extended family and that of her husband. I found that the material was a little too thin in the last half of the book and it was only with difficulty that I was able to maintain any interest. I was left with the impression that she was writing this for a paycheck and sticking to the only topic she was comfortable with.
Additionally, and probably irrelevantly, she came across as cold and shallow in her treatment of her husband, leaving him when he was in financial hardship and shortly after he barely survived a serious accident. Most of her issues should have been covered by the marriage vows (in sickness and in health, rich times and poor, etc.)but perhaps there were issues she chose not to share.
In spite of the shortage of new subject matter in this memoir, it is impossible to hide the fact that Fuller is a great writer. I know that I have at least one of her other titles at home and I intend to enjoy reading it.
Additionally, and probably irrelevantly, she came across as cold and shallow in her treatment of her husband, leaving him when he was in financial hardship and shortly after he barely survived a serious accident. Most of her issues should have been covered by the marriage vows (in sickness and in health, rich times and poor, etc.)but perhaps there were issues she chose not to share.
In spite of the shortage of new subject matter in this memoir, it is impossible to hide the fact that Fuller is a great writer. I know that I have at least one of her other titles at home and I intend to enjoy reading it.
March 19, 2015
Ugh. I've not read Fuller's earlier memoirs because I'm not especially interested in white colonists in southern Africa. This I bought because I am interested in memoirs about the intricacies of marriage. Unfortunately this one is also mostly about Fuller's family of white colonists in southern Africa. While Fuller recognizes that her family is kind of problematic, she is also just SO enamored of them and all their English aristocratic idiosyncrasies that it kind of drips off the page.
So, for those who liked Fuller's first two memoirs, I'll bet this is for you. For those who thought it would be the story of the relationship she had/has with her now ex-husband, keep moving. I found it pretty insufferable and I have to say that I don't see all the excitement people have about her writing, which I thought was affected and precious.
So, for those who liked Fuller's first two memoirs, I'll bet this is for you. For those who thought it would be the story of the relationship she had/has with her now ex-husband, keep moving. I found it pretty insufferable and I have to say that I don't see all the excitement people have about her writing, which I thought was affected and precious.
June 15, 2015
I have been a huge fan of Alexandra Fuller. Whenever someone tells me they are going on vacation and want to pick up a good book, my go-to recommendations are always "Don't Let's Go To the Dogs Tonight" and "All Over But the Shoutin'". So when I tell you I was disappointed in "Leaving Before the Rains Come", I want you to know it pains me deeply.
Billed as the story of Fuller's failed marriage, she begins the book by describing her post-college, pre-marriage years in Africa, where she seems at loose ends. Needless to say, this is not a good situation in which to choose a husband. Escaping boredom is not a good reason for marriage, and sure enough, her marriage is on the rocks fairly quickly.
My first problem is one of my pet peeves - the description of how bored she is all day long at home with nothing to do. Please do not tell me that you cannot find something to do - read a book, learn to bake bread, take up painting - god, if I could stay home all day, you would never hear me complain. I know, I know... I said it was MY pet peeve.
My next problem is that the trouble in her marriage is kind of mysterious. To spare her husband's feelings, Fuller may have been purposefully evasive, but this is not very helpful in a memoir. If an author is not honest in his/her memoir, then isn't that book just a novel? Here are the various reasons for the trouble in her marriage - her husband is emotionally withholding (but wasn't this obvious during her courtship?); she is too loud and noisy (but wasn't this obvious to her husband during their courtship?); they have tremendous financial difficulties (OK, she is really vague on this one - did her husband make risky investments? - did he steal and squander her writing fees and royalties? - was he too proud to take a menial job? - were they spendthrifts? - All of these are hinted at, but there is no real explanation, and if you cannot figure out where you went wrong with the figures in black and white on a page, then you are obfuscating.) - maybe she has bipolar disorder (again, this is hinted at, and since, lately, bipolar disorder seems to be popping up all over, and is the explanation for much of all bad behavior, I am just not buying it) - she has an affair (sigh). I am not a believer in staying together for the sake of the children, but if you really don't know what is going wrong in your marriage, then maybe you should stay together for the sake of the children. I have had friends who got divorced because their husbands were abusive, or could not hold a job, or were financially irresponsible, or slept around, or were lousy, unreliable, cruel fathers, or drank to excess, or saw nothing wrong with doing cocaine on the coffee table while caring for their toddler - any of which are substantial reasons to call it quits despite the kids, but Fuller's description of her marriage did not seem to lay any such reason out for her marriage's failure, so, to me, as a reader, I finished the book feeling completely confused.
Where all of Fuller's other books have a crystalline ring of truth in them, this one just rang hollow and false, but I will still be recommending her other books to anyone who asks.
Billed as the story of Fuller's failed marriage, she begins the book by describing her post-college, pre-marriage years in Africa, where she seems at loose ends. Needless to say, this is not a good situation in which to choose a husband. Escaping boredom is not a good reason for marriage, and sure enough, her marriage is on the rocks fairly quickly.
My first problem is one of my pet peeves - the description of how bored she is all day long at home with nothing to do. Please do not tell me that you cannot find something to do - read a book, learn to bake bread, take up painting - god, if I could stay home all day, you would never hear me complain. I know, I know... I said it was MY pet peeve.
My next problem is that the trouble in her marriage is kind of mysterious. To spare her husband's feelings, Fuller may have been purposefully evasive, but this is not very helpful in a memoir. If an author is not honest in his/her memoir, then isn't that book just a novel? Here are the various reasons for the trouble in her marriage - her husband is emotionally withholding (but wasn't this obvious during her courtship?); she is too loud and noisy (but wasn't this obvious to her husband during their courtship?); they have tremendous financial difficulties (OK, she is really vague on this one - did her husband make risky investments? - did he steal and squander her writing fees and royalties? - was he too proud to take a menial job? - were they spendthrifts? - All of these are hinted at, but there is no real explanation, and if you cannot figure out where you went wrong with the figures in black and white on a page, then you are obfuscating.) - maybe she has bipolar disorder (again, this is hinted at, and since, lately, bipolar disorder seems to be popping up all over, and is the explanation for much of all bad behavior, I am just not buying it) - she has an affair (sigh). I am not a believer in staying together for the sake of the children, but if you really don't know what is going wrong in your marriage, then maybe you should stay together for the sake of the children. I have had friends who got divorced because their husbands were abusive, or could not hold a job, or were financially irresponsible, or slept around, or were lousy, unreliable, cruel fathers, or drank to excess, or saw nothing wrong with doing cocaine on the coffee table while caring for their toddler - any of which are substantial reasons to call it quits despite the kids, but Fuller's description of her marriage did not seem to lay any such reason out for her marriage's failure, so, to me, as a reader, I finished the book feeling completely confused.
Where all of Fuller's other books have a crystalline ring of truth in them, this one just rang hollow and false, but I will still be recommending her other books to anyone who asks.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 15, 2024
Another wonderful memoir from Ms. Fuller. She writes so well, her books are always a pleasure to read. Here, she is describing her marriage to Charlie, and her adjustment to life in the US when she moves there after an initial two years in Zambia where her eldest child was born. Because of her parents way of life, she had no experience with bank accounts, financial planning, mortgages, credit cards, or any of the normal American way in which people become indebted work slaves (her words). It is a very interesting viewpoint, really, and the other thing she notes is how incredibly expensive everything is in the US as compared to Africa. Over time, the financial strain, combined with her marriage to a man so different than those she knew in Africa (her father and her father's friends, mostly) meant the marriage ended up on the rocks. Part of the issue, in my view, was that Charlie didn't have a sense of humor, or a real sense of adventure, putting aside the very organized whitewater rafting trips he specialized in. The two of them were mismatched from the beginning.
We get more of the wonderful story telling of Africa, and of Tim and Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, but also a sad report on how Africa is changing, modernizing, and in many ways not for the better. We also get a fascinating glimpse of Ms. Fuller's ancestors in Britain, who, as it turns out were pals with royalty and quite well off, but they rejected Tim completely when he settled in Africa. All in all, another compulsively readable book from a fascinating author.
We get more of the wonderful story telling of Africa, and of Tim and Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, but also a sad report on how Africa is changing, modernizing, and in many ways not for the better. We also get a fascinating glimpse of Ms. Fuller's ancestors in Britain, who, as it turns out were pals with royalty and quite well off, but they rejected Tim completely when he settled in Africa. All in all, another compulsively readable book from a fascinating author.
March 2, 2015
Evidently, Fuller covered the material of the disintegration of her marriage in an earlier book, one that did not cross my radar even though I've been reading her for over 10 years. I'm glad I read this one without having read that one, since from the description, it is a much thinner volume, more of a bloodletting than a true memoir. This one incorporates memories from childhood, young womanhood, and in particular, her very special family which she has written about in earlier books. Of this, I can't get enough. It is astounding that she had written a large number of novels that were rejected, but that when she found her voice in using her own life as material, she took off. This is a stunning book, with equal parts humor and sadness. Here's hoping she's happy in her current situation which seems to be living in a yurt with a view of the Tetons. But here's hoping she keeps writing.
December 7, 2014
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.
Unlike most readers of this book, I suspect, I have not read Fuller's previous books, so this was my first exposure to her voice. I loved it. She is open, honest, not overly critical but also questioning. She is near a divorce and looking back on her adult life and examining how she got there. What was she looking for in marriage? As an adult, what did she expect from herself? How is her family and upbringing tangled up in all that?
I don't agree with all the choices that she made, but I don't think I need to in order to love the book. I love the writing and the characters she paints around herself. These are, of course, real people, but in a good memoir they also need to be painted as characters. Her voice is clear and strong, and her examination of her own life is inspiring.
The central question of the memoir deals with how to live with risk. Her childhood was fraught with risk, danger. She was looking to escape that when she got married, but none of really can escape it. The finanacial risk was made obvious to her when the recession of 2008 hit, but it was clear before that, as well. The discussion she has with herself in this memoir reminds me of a conversation I had with my mother years ago, when my employment was uncertain and I didn't know where I would be in a year. My mother looked confused at my complaint about the stress of uncertainty. "No one knows where they're going to be in a year,", she said. "They just think they do. You're simply better informed." So we all make choices about how ordered our lives will seem, what rules we choose to enforce. Fuller grew up without rules, and married a man who liked rules. But that seems to be a conflict she needs to resolve now in her adulthood.
In the end, I liked the writing, I liked the ideas, and I liked the author. Great read.
Unlike most readers of this book, I suspect, I have not read Fuller's previous books, so this was my first exposure to her voice. I loved it. She is open, honest, not overly critical but also questioning. She is near a divorce and looking back on her adult life and examining how she got there. What was she looking for in marriage? As an adult, what did she expect from herself? How is her family and upbringing tangled up in all that?
I don't agree with all the choices that she made, but I don't think I need to in order to love the book. I love the writing and the characters she paints around herself. These are, of course, real people, but in a good memoir they also need to be painted as characters. Her voice is clear and strong, and her examination of her own life is inspiring.
The central question of the memoir deals with how to live with risk. Her childhood was fraught with risk, danger. She was looking to escape that when she got married, but none of really can escape it. The finanacial risk was made obvious to her when the recession of 2008 hit, but it was clear before that, as well. The discussion she has with herself in this memoir reminds me of a conversation I had with my mother years ago, when my employment was uncertain and I didn't know where I would be in a year. My mother looked confused at my complaint about the stress of uncertainty. "No one knows where they're going to be in a year,", she said. "They just think they do. You're simply better informed." So we all make choices about how ordered our lives will seem, what rules we choose to enforce. Fuller grew up without rules, and married a man who liked rules. But that seems to be a conflict she needs to resolve now in her adulthood.
In the end, I liked the writing, I liked the ideas, and I liked the author. Great read.
February 9, 2015
First of all, I'm pretty picky when it comes to memoirs. I would say I mainly only like them when they tie in to a larger historic event or when they're humorous. "Leaving Before the Rains Come" is more of a musing, wandering reminiscence of emotions tied to strings of loosely connected memories. The book's main focus is the dissolution of Fuller's almost twenty year marriage, but it also delves deeply into Fuller's life growing up on the African continent, her parents and their relationship, and her comparison of living in the U.S. vs. southern Africa. These are all apparently often recurring themes in Fuller's works. I enjoyed Fuller's telling of the various unique struggles and perspectives of those living in the chaos of Africa, as well as the inserted words of wisdom from her father. The book lost me, however, in the author's telling of her divorce, especially through the second half, which felt dragged out. For one, Fuller seems to take a sort of snooty position towards America and our luxurious quality of life, almost as if we are not as authentically living because of it. Also, I felt myself siding with her husband, as I probably relate to him more in mindset and background. We don't really get to here much of his voice, but I found Fuller to be a bit stubborn and unwilling. She mentions they only dated for six month before they got married, and it feels as if the day after their wedding everything sort of fell apart. I suspect (and sincerely hope) that isn't true since they stayed together for so many years. In the end, it just felt grim - though maybe that's not surprising for a book about divorce.
March 15, 2023
**On the 2023 Re-read**
This book is the kind of marvelous where you go all achy as the resonance of her wisdom goes down the marrow pipes of your bones, then ripples back up to the crown of your skull and you break out in gooseflesh. Probably her best book? The other contender is still lurking in the re-read pile, but I don't see how this book could possibly be outshone. I don't say this lightly: it is truly a privilege to read this book.
**Original Review Below**
In February 2015 I went to see Alexandra Fuller speak at the Boulder Book Store. She arrived at the same time I did so we climbed the stairs to the second floor next to each other and I can honestly say this is one of two times in my life when I've felt star-struck (the other time was helping Bill Vollmann move a table across a bar room in Portland). She probably saw me gawking like an idiot but I think I kept myself mostly in check.
The second shock of the evening came while I was scanning the turnout at her reading. I had a readership demographic in mind after having read her books but the reality was completely different. She clearly deserves a wider readership than she currently enjoys. So permit me this plug: Alexandra Fuller is an astonishingly perceptive writer and each of her books offers the world refracted in such a way that it's impossible to ignore her conclusions. She is one of the writers I can point to as having shaped my thoughts and feelings. She's everything a writer should be. Read her.
This book is the kind of marvelous where you go all achy as the resonance of her wisdom goes down the marrow pipes of your bones, then ripples back up to the crown of your skull and you break out in gooseflesh. Probably her best book? The other contender is still lurking in the re-read pile, but I don't see how this book could possibly be outshone. I don't say this lightly: it is truly a privilege to read this book.
**Original Review Below**
In February 2015 I went to see Alexandra Fuller speak at the Boulder Book Store. She arrived at the same time I did so we climbed the stairs to the second floor next to each other and I can honestly say this is one of two times in my life when I've felt star-struck (the other time was helping Bill Vollmann move a table across a bar room in Portland). She probably saw me gawking like an idiot but I think I kept myself mostly in check.
The second shock of the evening came while I was scanning the turnout at her reading. I had a readership demographic in mind after having read her books but the reality was completely different. She clearly deserves a wider readership than she currently enjoys. So permit me this plug: Alexandra Fuller is an astonishingly perceptive writer and each of her books offers the world refracted in such a way that it's impossible to ignore her conclusions. She is one of the writers I can point to as having shaped my thoughts and feelings. She's everything a writer should be. Read her.
December 9, 2016
Alexandra Fuller is a terrific writer . . . open this book on any page and you will read a knock-out sentence. Her writing combines vivid imagery with clear-eyed (sometimes painfully so) analysis, and no doubt she is her own best subject. (In this memoir, she reveals that she couldn't get her fiction published until she begin writing about her own life. It turned out that non-fiction was her metier.)
Fuller grew up in the chaotic atmosphere of Rhodesia undergoing a war of independence. Her parents were British colonials who felt most at home in Africa - despite its poverty, violence and tenuousness. Fuller tells the story of her childhood in Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight - an utterly memorable book. In this memoir, she draws again on that childhood but through a different prism. When she meets her American husband-to-be, she thinks he embodies the best of her childhood (grit, courage, skill in the wild) - but without the drunkenness and darkness. In her own words: "It was what I had wanted, a ticket out of disorder and into calm, but now that I was here I felt imprisoned, suffocated." Fuller and her husband move to Wyoming early in the their marriage, and they both turn to mundane jobs to pay the bills. In some ways, this book is about the American Dream gone sour. As her father says, when he sees their huge American home with all of its accoutrements: "Who pays for all this lot?" As it turns out, both of them pay - with incessant work, stress and anxiety.
Fuller seems like such a tough and intelligent woman that it is startling to realise that she has some deep vulnerabilities. In the broadest sense, this memoir is the process of her figuring out who she is and what she wants as a person. She married young, without a sense of what other choices there might be for her. Her "opposites attract" relationship with her husband gradually revealed itself as a deep incompatibility. Although it has many strong points, this book reads like a pretty brutal therapy session. It is about the slow dissolution of her marriage - which, from the way she tells it, was on the rocks during the first precarious year - and after reading it I felt emotionally wrung-out. It may or may not be helpful for those undergoing similar ordeals, but it probably will not be enjoyed by anyone looking for a light-hearted, feel-good read.
Fuller grew up in the chaotic atmosphere of Rhodesia undergoing a war of independence. Her parents were British colonials who felt most at home in Africa - despite its poverty, violence and tenuousness. Fuller tells the story of her childhood in Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight - an utterly memorable book. In this memoir, she draws again on that childhood but through a different prism. When she meets her American husband-to-be, she thinks he embodies the best of her childhood (grit, courage, skill in the wild) - but without the drunkenness and darkness. In her own words: "It was what I had wanted, a ticket out of disorder and into calm, but now that I was here I felt imprisoned, suffocated." Fuller and her husband move to Wyoming early in the their marriage, and they both turn to mundane jobs to pay the bills. In some ways, this book is about the American Dream gone sour. As her father says, when he sees their huge American home with all of its accoutrements: "Who pays for all this lot?" As it turns out, both of them pay - with incessant work, stress and anxiety.
Fuller seems like such a tough and intelligent woman that it is startling to realise that she has some deep vulnerabilities. In the broadest sense, this memoir is the process of her figuring out who she is and what she wants as a person. She married young, without a sense of what other choices there might be for her. Her "opposites attract" relationship with her husband gradually revealed itself as a deep incompatibility. Although it has many strong points, this book reads like a pretty brutal therapy session. It is about the slow dissolution of her marriage - which, from the way she tells it, was on the rocks during the first precarious year - and after reading it I felt emotionally wrung-out. It may or may not be helpful for those undergoing similar ordeals, but it probably will not be enjoyed by anyone looking for a light-hearted, feel-good read.
April 13, 2021
Oh my. I find everything Alexandra Fuller writes so compelling. She reminds me of Cheryl Strayed in her revelatory writing about terrible experiences. I listened to this, read by the author, and her lovely accent transported me.
June 25, 2018
In the late spring of 2010, I was going through a difficult time in my life. We all have the rough times, whether it be days or years but judging my own life thus far, this period was the second most difficult time I've experienced.
I went to a talk and book signing with Alexandra Fuller. I was struck by her physical beauty and, much more so, her voice and her words. I asked her to sign my copy of Don't Let's Go To the Dogs Tonight and I told her that while things had been difficult in my life, I pulled strength and warmth from her words. She was gracious, humble, unbelievably kind, and signed my book with a personal and beautiful epigraph.
Having just finished Fuller's new memoir, Leaving Before the Rains Come, I can now see that her life was also difficult at the time that I met her. About a year and a half later, the remnants of her marriage were obliterated when her husband suffered a horrific riding accident. They were living in Wyoming at the time and attempts to save his life ended with bringing him to the ICU at the University of Utah here in Salt Lake. I am nothing more than a complete stranger to Fuller, but when I read about her fear and grief as she waited through his surgeries, alone, I wish so deeply that I could have been there. Just to sit, to listen if needed, to be a presence.
This wasn't just a sympathetic yearning but an empathic urge from a woman who has been there. Some of the elements in her situation were startlingly similar to the earlier, highly traumatic event in my life. A stroke, multiple ambulances, a lifeflight in a tiny, tiny plane over an ocean, and days of uncertainty sparked with moments of hope. I was also alone, utterly alone in a foreign country, and reading Fuller's experience was rather traumatic for me.
I've seen criticisms out there regarding Fuller's memoirs, this one in particular due to the extremely unfortunate coincidence that her marriage was already nearing its end at the time of the accident (they, in fact, had ridden the horses out to discuss a truce over the emotional upheaval in their lives). It should also be noted that he wasn't crushed by his horse and she walked away. She advocated for his care in every way she thought he would want, and she nursed him for months afterwards despite that they'd already been talking about divorce. I'd like to go ahead and dredge up my tired admonition about those who criticize authors for making these narratives "all about" themselves with the reminder that it is a memoir. What else do you expect? The best memoirs, however, skillfully relate the author's experience to those of others, and their context in the larger community.
This isn't all to say that Fuller doesn't carry her own blame and share of responsibility for the decline of her marriage. To be honest, I'm not sure I could have stayed so long with a man about whom she described this way:
Early in the marriage, while they were still living in Zambia, in a complete hovel of a place with no running water and biting ants covering the floor, Fuller had their first baby. She begged her husband for some improvement to their conditions but to no avail. They were surrounded by constant deaths from malaria and yellow fever and Fuller was terrified of her newborn baby dying. Fuller caught malaria, not for the first time, but for the worst time in her life and, finally, was literally dying of the disease. As she cradled her baby and felt herself falling into unconsciousness, she said to her husband, "I'm not going to come out of this."
His response?
"Bummer."
Fuller wrote that she realized very early on, even before they left Africa, that her husband was disappointed in her, and she was never going to live up to his standards. But she still chose to leave with him, have two more children with him, and willingly block him out whenever he tried to tell her how drastic their financial situation was. He took jobs that seemed to erode his soul and connection to the land he loved, in an attempt to buoy up their lives but because his actions conflicted with her ideals, Fuller repeatedly criticized his efforts.
But certainly (amongst other incidents shared in the book and I'm sure much more she didn't share - she did seem to attempt to be relatively balanced in her narrative), no one who can respond like that to his new bride's impending death can be a thoroughly joyful person to live with for more than twenty years. I mean sure, there's black humor, but there's also common decency and love for another person (let alone your wife and mother of your newborn daughter).
Fuller's writing is astonishing. Eloquent, horrifying, deeply honest. She does this thing where she builds up deceptively simply constructed sentences that then turn on a dime into a beautiful and illuminated way of thinking about something. Fuller's mother has a history of deeply disturbing bouts of depression (see Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness) and when Fuller's marriage and life in general was falling apart, she was certain that she was going to fall to pieces as wholly and destructively as her mother. Her downfall (fortunately) wasn't as spectacular as those her mother suffers. But shortly before she fell apart, she talked at a literacy-for-Africa event where she horrified the audience by saying that African women need to know how to read and write so that they can better report the rape and other atrocities that happen to them. Afterwards, an older African man came up and chastised her for talking about such things, saying that she was "not a good daughter of Africa." Fuller rebelled against him, confronted him loudly in front of everyone, but then ultimately fell apart and said to him, "You're right, I'm not a good daughter of Africa."
"The truth is, I wasn't only not a good daughter of Africa, I was not a good daughter of anywhere, nor was I a good wife or a good mother. I was a woman on the brink of free fall, and it was hard to be a good, acceptable woman in any language or in any place when simultaneously contemplating becoming undone. For the first time, I was beginning to see that for a woman to speak her mind in any clear, unassailable unapologetic way, she must first possess it."
I went to a talk and book signing with Alexandra Fuller. I was struck by her physical beauty and, much more so, her voice and her words. I asked her to sign my copy of Don't Let's Go To the Dogs Tonight and I told her that while things had been difficult in my life, I pulled strength and warmth from her words. She was gracious, humble, unbelievably kind, and signed my book with a personal and beautiful epigraph.
Having just finished Fuller's new memoir, Leaving Before the Rains Come, I can now see that her life was also difficult at the time that I met her. About a year and a half later, the remnants of her marriage were obliterated when her husband suffered a horrific riding accident. They were living in Wyoming at the time and attempts to save his life ended with bringing him to the ICU at the University of Utah here in Salt Lake. I am nothing more than a complete stranger to Fuller, but when I read about her fear and grief as she waited through his surgeries, alone, I wish so deeply that I could have been there. Just to sit, to listen if needed, to be a presence.
This wasn't just a sympathetic yearning but an empathic urge from a woman who has been there. Some of the elements in her situation were startlingly similar to the earlier, highly traumatic event in my life. A stroke, multiple ambulances, a lifeflight in a tiny, tiny plane over an ocean, and days of uncertainty sparked with moments of hope. I was also alone, utterly alone in a foreign country, and reading Fuller's experience was rather traumatic for me.
I've seen criticisms out there regarding Fuller's memoirs, this one in particular due to the extremely unfortunate coincidence that her marriage was already nearing its end at the time of the accident (they, in fact, had ridden the horses out to discuss a truce over the emotional upheaval in their lives). It should also be noted that he wasn't crushed by his horse and she walked away. She advocated for his care in every way she thought he would want, and she nursed him for months afterwards despite that they'd already been talking about divorce. I'd like to go ahead and dredge up my tired admonition about those who criticize authors for making these narratives "all about" themselves with the reminder that it is a memoir. What else do you expect? The best memoirs, however, skillfully relate the author's experience to those of others, and their context in the larger community.
This isn't all to say that Fuller doesn't carry her own blame and share of responsibility for the decline of her marriage. To be honest, I'm not sure I could have stayed so long with a man about whom she described this way:
Early in the marriage, while they were still living in Zambia, in a complete hovel of a place with no running water and biting ants covering the floor, Fuller had their first baby. She begged her husband for some improvement to their conditions but to no avail. They were surrounded by constant deaths from malaria and yellow fever and Fuller was terrified of her newborn baby dying. Fuller caught malaria, not for the first time, but for the worst time in her life and, finally, was literally dying of the disease. As she cradled her baby and felt herself falling into unconsciousness, she said to her husband, "I'm not going to come out of this."
His response?
"Bummer."
Fuller wrote that she realized very early on, even before they left Africa, that her husband was disappointed in her, and she was never going to live up to his standards. But she still chose to leave with him, have two more children with him, and willingly block him out whenever he tried to tell her how drastic their financial situation was. He took jobs that seemed to erode his soul and connection to the land he loved, in an attempt to buoy up their lives but because his actions conflicted with her ideals, Fuller repeatedly criticized his efforts.
But certainly (amongst other incidents shared in the book and I'm sure much more she didn't share - she did seem to attempt to be relatively balanced in her narrative), no one who can respond like that to his new bride's impending death can be a thoroughly joyful person to live with for more than twenty years. I mean sure, there's black humor, but there's also common decency and love for another person (let alone your wife and mother of your newborn daughter).
Fuller's writing is astonishing. Eloquent, horrifying, deeply honest. She does this thing where she builds up deceptively simply constructed sentences that then turn on a dime into a beautiful and illuminated way of thinking about something. Fuller's mother has a history of deeply disturbing bouts of depression (see Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness) and when Fuller's marriage and life in general was falling apart, she was certain that she was going to fall to pieces as wholly and destructively as her mother. Her downfall (fortunately) wasn't as spectacular as those her mother suffers. But shortly before she fell apart, she talked at a literacy-for-Africa event where she horrified the audience by saying that African women need to know how to read and write so that they can better report the rape and other atrocities that happen to them. Afterwards, an older African man came up and chastised her for talking about such things, saying that she was "not a good daughter of Africa." Fuller rebelled against him, confronted him loudly in front of everyone, but then ultimately fell apart and said to him, "You're right, I'm not a good daughter of Africa."
"The truth is, I wasn't only not a good daughter of Africa, I was not a good daughter of anywhere, nor was I a good wife or a good mother. I was a woman on the brink of free fall, and it was hard to be a good, acceptable woman in any language or in any place when simultaneously contemplating becoming undone. For the first time, I was beginning to see that for a woman to speak her mind in any clear, unassailable unapologetic way, she must first possess it."
July 29, 2025
An exceptionally slow start that did not define the characters well for me. However, once it got rolling, it was fairly good.
January 26, 2016
“The problem with most people,” Dad said one, not necessarily implying that I counted as most people, but not discounting the possibility either, “is that they want to be alive for as long as possible without having any idea whatsoever how to live.” p. 20
Last spring, a good friend started talking about Alexandra Fuller. My friend was looking forward to reading this portion of Fuller’s memoirs. At that time, I had not read anything by Fuller. I had a copy of her first book, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight sitting on my bookshelves that I had picked up somewhere. It had sat on my shelf for years, but the memoir had never attracted me enough to pick it up. That was definitely my loss. Now less than a year later, I have finished Fuller’s three memoirs and I am very sad. I am sad because I won’t be learning anything more from Fuller for awhile. This book was just published, so I don’t expect another book from her for awhile.
Also I am sad since this book was about the dissolution of her marriage. I know that marriage is different for everyone; even a couple sees their marriage through their own histories. It must be very hard to write about something that you had hope, faith and love in. Fuller does an excellent job of clearly seeing what went wrong with her marriage, at least she makes it clear to me. That is one of the reasons that I have read all of her autobiographies – she has provided me with comprehensible information about her life. She has shown me how a continent can become a defining part of a person’s life. She has also written well on family, grief and love. I am very glad I have encountered Fuller and learned more about her life.
If you are interested in people’s lives, if you like reading about different countries or how folks survive difficult situations, I highly recommend Fuller’s story. Her story is amazing.
The books that led me to this one (in chronological order):
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness
Other autobiographies that I enjoyed:
Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language
An Embarrassment of Mangoes: A Caribbean Interlude
My First White Friend: Confessions on Race, Love and Forgiveness
Poor Man's Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking
Last spring, a good friend started talking about Alexandra Fuller. My friend was looking forward to reading this portion of Fuller’s memoirs. At that time, I had not read anything by Fuller. I had a copy of her first book, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight sitting on my bookshelves that I had picked up somewhere. It had sat on my shelf for years, but the memoir had never attracted me enough to pick it up. That was definitely my loss. Now less than a year later, I have finished Fuller’s three memoirs and I am very sad. I am sad because I won’t be learning anything more from Fuller for awhile. This book was just published, so I don’t expect another book from her for awhile.
Also I am sad since this book was about the dissolution of her marriage. I know that marriage is different for everyone; even a couple sees their marriage through their own histories. It must be very hard to write about something that you had hope, faith and love in. Fuller does an excellent job of clearly seeing what went wrong with her marriage, at least she makes it clear to me. That is one of the reasons that I have read all of her autobiographies – she has provided me with comprehensible information about her life. She has shown me how a continent can become a defining part of a person’s life. She has also written well on family, grief and love. I am very glad I have encountered Fuller and learned more about her life.
If you are interested in people’s lives, if you like reading about different countries or how folks survive difficult situations, I highly recommend Fuller’s story. Her story is amazing.
The books that led me to this one (in chronological order):
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness
Other autobiographies that I enjoyed:
Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language
An Embarrassment of Mangoes: A Caribbean Interlude
My First White Friend: Confessions on Race, Love and Forgiveness
Poor Man's Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking
March 22, 2015
First I must say you will surely be confused if you read this book without at least reading Alexandra's Fuller's first memoir, Don't Lets Go To The Dogs Tonight , which details her upbringing as one daughter of a very eccentric white family living in Africa, up until the time she marries a visiting American man Charlie Ross at age 22. This is the third book but as the second book was largely about her parents, it is easy to begin here as Fuller describes her adventurous courtship with Ross in Zambia and later how she falls ill with Malaria on her wedding day. This is the story of her adult life, as together she and Ross decide to leave the dangerous but comparatively leisurely paced days of Africa to go to the mountains of Wyoming where they plan to enjoy the wilderness , and better health, but soon fall victim to stark reality which requires them to become more pragmatic in order to provide for their growing family. So Alexandra writes and Charlie becomes a land developer and realtor( after dreaming of being a river guide). And gradually their unorthodox marriage begins to unravel , as books are rejected and the real estate market flounders . This is a beautifully written book about the misfortunate events causing people to lose grasp of their dreams along with losing each other.
There are lots of highlighted phrases in my book .
"You always think there will be more time and then suddenly there isn't. You know how it is , you have to leave before the rains come, or it's too late."
" After spending a lifetime fearfully waiting for someone to come and save her- she discovered that in the end, we all simply have to save ourselves."
4 stars but recommend reading first book
There are lots of highlighted phrases in my book .
"You always think there will be more time and then suddenly there isn't. You know how it is , you have to leave before the rains come, or it's too late."
" After spending a lifetime fearfully waiting for someone to come and save her- she discovered that in the end, we all simply have to save ourselves."
4 stars but recommend reading first book
November 20, 2014
Al recounts her Anglo-African upbringing in Rhodesia/Zambia. The bonds forged between her and her parents, Vanessa, her older sister, and her husband Charlie are all borne of the circumstances and environment. At 23, she is fascinated by Charlie's "immunity" to the dangers and fragility of life, but they find it hard to become united in the way that her parents have.
All of the places-Zambia, Wyoming, London finishing school, Kenya-can easily come off as exotic and while we do come to appreciate the splendor of the land, notions of a "continental African" experience/identity and American easy-living are quickly dismissed. Also the influence of time on Rhodesia/Zambia is accounted for--as the civil war time dangers are replaced by a new "seriously consequential capitalism" and strong Chinese presence.
When she explains that she and Vanessa, and many other female children, were vulnerable to molestation and advances--it seemed so commonplace and that was truly upsetting because with Boko Haram attackS, etc, it seems like not much has changed about young girls' position in the world.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/econom...
All of the places-Zambia, Wyoming, London finishing school, Kenya-can easily come off as exotic and while we do come to appreciate the splendor of the land, notions of a "continental African" experience/identity and American easy-living are quickly dismissed. Also the influence of time on Rhodesia/Zambia is accounted for--as the civil war time dangers are replaced by a new "seriously consequential capitalism" and strong Chinese presence.
When she explains that she and Vanessa, and many other female children, were vulnerable to molestation and advances--it seemed so commonplace and that was truly upsetting because with Boko Haram attackS, etc, it seems like not much has changed about young girls' position in the world.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/econom...
March 2, 2015
Sorely disappointed by this book, which I have looked forward to so eagerly. It retreads old content from Alexandra Fuller's two other memoirs and combines with it a pretty classic tale of a dying marriage. We all are damaged in our particular ways and Fuller's upbringing under unreliable and sometimes tragic conditions resulted in a personality that may have been ill-suited to domestic life. But the marriage doesn't appear that remarkable, nor do the reasons for its dissolution (money arguments, gradual distancing, an affair) so a front-row seat to its unraveling seems unnecessary. The marital money arguments are straight out of I Love Lucy, and Fuller is so ignorant of family's finances that she cannot understand why, in a recession, they can't afford their custom-built house, custom-built cabin, 4 horses, frequent intercontinental travel, and what must be 24/7 babysitting for their 3 kids. Fuller's writing can be extraordinary and she does communicate painfully her alienation but at the end the book doesn't add up to much.
March 27, 2015
I've always been a BIG fan of Bo Fuller's writing. But this one left me flummoxed. Who really cares about her divorce to Charlie? I wonder what he thinks about the book? Did he okay it? I kinda felt sorry for him throughout my reading of it. Okay, she's still a very good writer and the way she delivers a line of text is sometimes mind boggling, but please. I hope she moves on to more interesting subject matter. This felt too much like self-therapy writing. I did enjoy the bits about her past growing up in Africa I didn't know previously and the new insights into her parents past and relationship as well. I look forward seeing something fresh and new in the future.
February 23, 2015
Let me say from the outset, I love Fuller’s writing. For even though it is once again an examination of her upbringing and life, she conveys it so well, that if she wrote it on the back of a paper bag I would read it. I am never disappointed as she captures the essence of not only Africa but how that impacted upon the way she views the world and her approach to life.
“What did I know about the fifty-five (give or take) countries of Africa? I carried within me one deep personal thread of one small part of it, and it had changed and colored everything”.
Full review at:
http://greatreadsandtealeaves.blogspo...
“What did I know about the fifty-five (give or take) countries of Africa? I carried within me one deep personal thread of one small part of it, and it had changed and colored everything”.
Full review at:
http://greatreadsandtealeaves.blogspo...
January 22, 2015
Review to follow.
March 2, 2015
Sad, poignant and ironically funny. I somehow managed to read this book at just the right time...
July 8, 2022
Dwie gwiazdki za ostatnie dwa czy trzy rozdziały. Cała reszta... nie wiem, może to nie jest po prostu książka dla mnie. Wiedziałam, że jest to gatunek, którego nie czytam za często ale nie wiedziałam, że tak się na tym wynudzę.
February 4, 2015
The writing is interesting, the story not so much.
Fuller has impressive powers of description, and this is essential when trying to get the reader to understand what it's like to grow up in an untamed part of Africa and with a family of eccentrics whose only rule for children is "Don't be boring."
The story that takes up most of the book, which centers on her marriage to American Charlie Ross, her move to Wyoming with him, her life there, and the couple's eventual split, is not quite as impressive. In fact, it's very conventional. A couple gets caught up in the rat race of providing for themselves and their kids a lifestyle they can't really afford. As happened for many other such couples, the music stopped in 2008 when the financial crisis made it impossible for them to keep living beyond their means. The tensions caused by their financial problems destroyed their marriage. End of story.
I suppose the one unusual aspect of the story is the fact that Fuller came from a culture to which the relentless consumerism of Americans is quite foreign, something to which she was not at all accustomed and which she never really understood. She seems bewildered about why it was necessary for them to make so much money, to buy so many things, and to be so unhappy when it turned out they couldn't keep doing so. The book might have been a bit better had this aspect of the story been emphasized more than it was.
Fuller has impressive powers of description, and this is essential when trying to get the reader to understand what it's like to grow up in an untamed part of Africa and with a family of eccentrics whose only rule for children is "Don't be boring."
The story that takes up most of the book, which centers on her marriage to American Charlie Ross, her move to Wyoming with him, her life there, and the couple's eventual split, is not quite as impressive. In fact, it's very conventional. A couple gets caught up in the rat race of providing for themselves and their kids a lifestyle they can't really afford. As happened for many other such couples, the music stopped in 2008 when the financial crisis made it impossible for them to keep living beyond their means. The tensions caused by their financial problems destroyed their marriage. End of story.
I suppose the one unusual aspect of the story is the fact that Fuller came from a culture to which the relentless consumerism of Americans is quite foreign, something to which she was not at all accustomed and which she never really understood. She seems bewildered about why it was necessary for them to make so much money, to buy so many things, and to be so unhappy when it turned out they couldn't keep doing so. The book might have been a bit better had this aspect of the story been emphasized more than it was.
February 20, 2015
I adored this book as a reader and as a psychiatrist. It was simply riveting! It was hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure. Most who read the reviews will understand it is about the breakdown in her marriage but, it is also about so much more! Alexandra weaves a story of the histories of her and her husband's family histories as a way of coming to understand their own personal development and trajectories. She does a very skillful job of discussing this relationship breakdown without every slipping into disdain or being disrespectful of her ex-husband.
I kept thinking throughout the book about how one review I had read commented that her dad gets all the best lines! This is very true. Her love for her parents is palpable in this book, it makes me want to go back and reread "Let's not go to the dogs tonight" again, in the light of this new perspective!
I cannot recommend this book enough! In addition, this is one I feel I have to recommend as an audio-version as the author's reading of it just augments the story!
I kept thinking throughout the book about how one review I had read commented that her dad gets all the best lines! This is very true. Her love for her parents is palpable in this book, it makes me want to go back and reread "Let's not go to the dogs tonight" again, in the light of this new perspective!
I cannot recommend this book enough! In addition, this is one I feel I have to recommend as an audio-version as the author's reading of it just augments the story!
November 15, 2015
Leaving Before the Rains Come is a self-critical memoir by Alexandra Fuller who tells of being poorly raised by her shiftless, upper crust, boozy parents in Africa, where she is exposed to few trappings of her posh English ancestry other than the silly, elitist, propensity for giving family members nicknames like, Boofy and Mugger. Alexandra's is Bobo, which is how her parents always address her throughout the book. She is apparently fine with this as she is fine with their "benevolent" but patronizing treatment of the adult black Africans with whom they share land. Alexandra is given few skills to survive in more "citified" places in the world and when she is finally "rescued" (married) by a dashing river runner with ties to the American West, Alexandra struggles to adapt in a new country and to keep her marriage intact. She is however a skillful writer.
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