Alexandra Fuller's eighth book, the bereavement memoir Fi, poignantly reckons with the sudden death of Fuller's 21-year-old son and depicts its practical and spiritual aftermath.
Fuller's son, Fuller Ross, whose nickname was "Fi," died in his sleep in July 2018. He had a history of seizures, but Fuller never learned the cause of his death because she refused to read his autopsy report. Fi focuses on the eight months that followed, a period of concentrated, even ritualized mourning during which Fuller moved into a sheep wagon (a shelter used by shepherds, outfitted with a bed, a table and a wood-burning stove) in the mountains of Wyoming. Fuller found rigid routines and magical thinking equally valuable. She filled her days with scheduled hours of meditation and writing, but she also sought supernatural signs in nature and imagined that her son was among "the ancestors."
Fuller (Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness) grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) with alcoholic parents and was estranged from her mother and sister when her son died. Relatives and friends came alongside her, especially those who had experienced similar losses. A "sister-friend" lent the family a house in Hawaii, because "even grief--that most tireless and timeless and persistent of all our teachers--needs a vacation from time to time." Submerged as she was in her own depression, Fuller also managed to observe its effects on her daughters, recording the day--some three months after her son's death--she heard them laugh again.
This wrenching picture of "the doldrums of grief" is also wry and hopeful. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck