Alexandra Fuller

Isaiah Sheffer sits down with two memoirists, Alexandra Fuller and Wendy Kann, to discuss their memoirs from Africa: Fuller's Scribbling the Cat and Kann's Casting with a Fragile Thread.

From 1972 to 1990, Alexandra Fuller, known to friends and family as Bobo, grew up on several farms in southern and central Africa. Her father joined up on the side of the white government in the Rhodesian civil war and was often away fighting against the powerful black guerrilla factions. Her mother, in turn, flung herself into their African life and its rugged farmwork with the same passion and maniacal energy she brought to everything. She taught...

Alexandra Fuller braids a multilayered narrative around the perfectly-lit, Happy Valley-era Africa of her mother's childhood; the boiled cabbage grimness of her father's English childhood; and the darker, civil war-torn Africa of her own. A story of survival and madness, love and war, loyalty and forgiveness, this intimate exploration of Fuller's family - at its heart, the story of her mother, Nicola - is as funny, terrifying, exotic, and unselfconscious...

The author details her unique friendship with one of her parents' neighbors in Zambia, a white African and veteran of the Rhodesian war, and their mutual odyssey to revisit scenes of the war and come to terms with the horrors of warfare.

"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...