Fi

A Memoir

By: Alexandra Fuller

Narrated by: Alexandra Fuller

From the award-winning New York Times bestselling author, 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.

©2024 Alexandra Fuller (P)2024 Recorded Books

Dissection of grief

A poetic and graphic journey of one woman’s experience of grief. I appreciate anyone who can put into words what that dark place is like in an illuminating way.

Heartbreaking and beautiful.

I’ve read all of Fuller’s books and love and enjoy them each differently. I think this is the most realistic book on grief I’ve read and I’ve read countless after losing my husband way too soon. Fuller portrayed the desperation so well and then the slow healing steps following. An incredible read.

Phenomenal Fi

Beautifully and Poignantly written. Alexandra Fuller is my favourite author. Having grown up in South Africa, gone to a similar boarding school at age 11, and experiencing a tragic loss in my own family, this book touches me in a profound way. I understand the yearning she feels for her birth country, for her tribe, and the exquisite pain she felt at the loss of an ancestor

Oh this raw, healing journey hit hard

First of all having this heart rendering story narrated by the author Alexander took me right back to home, my tribe, phrases and reflection back on life in Rhodesia /Zambia (my roots) and so many parallel similarities to my journey through loss and grief hit hard. I cried big gut retching sobs, silent tears and tears of laughter throughout the narration. Thank you so much Bobo for sharing such a raw personal journey of loss, survival and a new normal.

Profound and important

This book was hard to listen to because of the strength of the emotion and the arduousness of the journey. But it’s a brave and important work. I feared it, but am glad I read it. Truly a beautiful and profound work.