Fi

From the award-winning New York Times-bestselling

author of Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller, comes a

career defining memoir about grieving the sudden loss of her

twenty-one-year-old child

"Fair to say,

I was in a ribald state the summer before my fiftieth birthday." And so begins

Alexandra Fuller's open, vivid new memoir, Fi. It's midsummer in Wyoming and

Alexandra is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home

country of Zimbabwe, reeling from a midlife breakup, freshly sober and piecing

her way uncertainly through a volatile new relationship with a younger woman,

Alexandra vows to get herself back on even keel.

And

then--suddenly and incomprehensibly--her son Fi, at twenty-one years old, dies in

his sleep.



No stranger

to loss--young siblings, a parent, a home country-- Alexandra is nonetheless

leveled. At the same time, she is painfully aware that she cannot succumb and

abandon her two surviving daughters as her mother before her had done. From a

sheep wagon deep in the mountains of Wyoming to a grief sanctuary in New Mexico

to a silent meditation retreat in Alberta, Canada, Alexandra journeys up and

down the spine of the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to find how to grieve

herself whole. There is no answer, and there are countless answers--in poetry,

in rituals and routines, in nature and in the indigenous wisdom she absorbed as

a child in Zimbabwe. By turns disarming, devastating and unexpectedly,

blessedly funny, Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grieving

a child in a culture that has no instructions for it.