Fi: A Memoir

by Alexandra Fuller

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Unforgettable from the story itself down to the quality of writing, you won't find a memoir with more heart than this. With deep and often devastating emotional resonance and unflinching hope in the face of it, this book is the literal defition of "hurts so good."

2025 PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST FOR MEMOIR

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

“An elegiac meditation on motherhood and grief, written from the rage and pain of losing a child, but in a voice that ultimately resonates with beauty and hard-won acceptance.”—Pulitzer Prize jury

“A mesmeric celebration of a boy who died too soon, a mother’s love and her resilience. It will help others surviving loss — surviving life.”—David Sheff, New York Times

“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 21 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802164964
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	04/08/2025
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 5.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Alexandra Fuller is the author of four memoirs, including Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight– 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 – and the New York Times-bestselling Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, two books of non-fiction, and the novel Quiet Until The Thaw. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, National Geographic, Granta, The New York Times, Guardian and Financial Times.

Hometown:

Wilson, Wyoming

Date of Birth:

March 29, 1969

Place of Birth:

Glossop, Derbyshire, England

Education:

B. A., Acadia University, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada, 1992

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Fi

A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of the Year

A New York Times Editors' Choice

A TIME  Top 10 Nonfiction Book (#2) and Must-Read Book of the Year

An Amazon Editors' Pick for Best Biographies & Memoirs of April

"Fuller is sagacious and perspicacious. She is a sublime writer. In the hands of another memoirist, the story of Fi might be unbearably sad, but this book is a mesmeric celebration of a boy who died too soon, a mother’s love and her resilience. It will help others surviving loss — surviving life.” — David Sheff, New York Times

"A book that is as hard to pick up as it is to put down—a gutting, terrifying, profound and defiantly enthralling read . . . This book is a sharp ax. By its end, I was moved and devastated yet somehow strengthened.” — Marion Winik, Washington Post

“Elegant and honest . . . [Fi] leaves the reader with a sense of having known a lovely and lively young man.” —New York Times, Editors’ Choice

“Galvanic . . . Fi embodies a paradox: It is a seductive read about unrelenting agony. Self-effacing, wise and dry, the author’s style may be described as ‘frenetic lyric’: The prose hurries as if it, too, was breathless to reach some finish line . . . [Fuller] emerges, if not healed, then a mother who is finally able to answer the only pressing question now: ‘Will we make it?’ Her answer is oblique but empathetic. The object the reader holds is the way a writer says yes.” — Melissa H. Pierson, Wall Street Journal

"Raised in Zimbabwe, Alexandra Fuller was no stranger to grief. She lost siblings, lived through a civil war, and witnessed her Uzi-toting mother battle alcoholism and despair. Still, though, as an adult, she “never thought life would serve me up something that stopped me dead.” Then out of nowhere, her 21-year-old son, Fi, dies in his sleep. [Fi] is a blistering journey through the immediate aftermath. While the subject matter is inescapably painful, Fuller’s gift for language and rhythm, her indefatigable curiosity, elevates her story beyond a primal scream. A read for anyone who’ve ever loved and lost, or ever will; in short, a book for us all.” — Oprah Daily, "Best New Books of Spring”

“Fi is a profound and gripping memoir about surviving unexpected, devastating loss. Like Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking, Fuller writes about her grief inside out . . . She is a sublime memoirist.” — Sunday Times

“[Fuller] doesn't spare us the pain inflicted by ‘the sharp knife of a short life.’” — Blake Morrison, The Guardian

"In the wake of immense loss, what remains? With clear, luminous prose and courageous insight, Fuller investigates . . . The writing is so stunning, immediate, and heartfelt that the book is often as difficult to read as it is to put down. A true marvel of a memoir, simultaneously beautiful and devastating.” — Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Fuller's prose is raw, primal, and electric, pulling the reader into both her shock and her attempts to carry on with a heart cleaved in two. Readers who are experiencing their own grief will find solace here, while those who've been following Fuller for years through her beautifully written memoirs will want to be with her as she recounts this tragedy.” — Booklist

"[Fuller’s] writing is always a knife pointed straight at the heart . . . [Her] fight for survival is against odds no parent should have to face, and it is unpadded and harsh. It means coming to terms with a loss Fuller is unsure she can handle without Fi to guide her. Fi is concerned with finding a way.” — Air Mail

“Fuller is unyielding in her honesty, laying herself bare on the page. With unflinching candour she recounts the agonizing weeks, days, hours and minutes following Fi’s death, her downward spiral into grief and her eventual reconnection with herself and the world around her. And only Fuller could inject humour into a story such as this . . . Fi will undoubtedly hit home with any readers grieving the loss of a loved one. It may also offer hope.” — Winnipeg Free Press

“Alexandra Fuller pulls off quite a feat by simultaneously filling her voice with both life and loss . . . Fuller is often bursting with rage and physical pain, and her voice quickening into near-rant with a raw edge translates both word and feeling perfectly.” — AudioFile

“In her darkest hour, Alexandra Fuller retreats to a sheep wagon in a high alpine meadow where she can be alone in the agony of her grief. Her son Fuller, or Fi, has just died from a seizure at the age of 21—‘in the fatness of summer, in the fullness of youth, on the brink of manhood’—and the wild is the only place she can exist as she breaks apart.” — Outside Magazine

“A fearless chronicler . . . [Fuller] looks to the natural world, finding that beauty still lingers, even in a world without Fi.”—Catherine Holmes, The Post and Courier 

“A truly extraordinary memoir about a mother’s loss of her son: beautiful, fearless, raw and an utterly compelling read.”— Helen Macdonald, author of H Is For Hawk

“Fi is a devastating, profoundly moving and ultimately uplifting memoir—as told by a brave, wonderful mother who found herself ultimately able to withstand the most terrible of tests.” — Ben Goldsmith, author of God is An Octopus: Loss, Love and a Calling to Nature

Praise for Alexandra Fuller

“Whew boy, can Alexandra Fuller write.”— New York Times

“Fuller is a magnificent, insightful writer.”— Washington Post

“Owning a great story doesn’t guarantee being able to tell it well. That’s the individual mystery of talent, a gift with which Alexandra Fuller is richly blessed.”— Entertainment Weekly

“[Fuller’s] writing is astoundingly good.” — Economist

“Vivid, insightful and sly.” — People

“By turns mischievous and openhearted, earthy and soaring . . . hair-raising, horrific, and thrilling.” — New Yorker

“Alexandra Fuller has always been a brave writer. We count on her bare-boned, carefully-crafted truths laced with wit and wisdom.” —Terry Tempest Williams

From the Publisher

In this memoir of the unexpected death of her son, Fi, Alexandra Fuller pulls off quite a feat by simultaneously filling her voice with both life and loss. Fuller grew up in Zimbabwe (DON'T LET'S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT), and her rich, warm voice contains appealing traces of that accent. Fi died at age 21 despite having no real health problems, and grief and incomprehension are clear in every word Fuller utters. But she is acerbically funny, too. One of her attempts to recover a sense of equilibrium is attending a silent retreat in Canada. The experience is odd enough, but the guard she encounters upon reentering the U.S. at an out-of-the-way border post is hilariously bonkers. Fuller is often bursting with rage and physical pain, and her voice quickening into a near-rant with a raw edge translates both word and feeling perfectly. A.B. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

MAY 2024 - AudioFile