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.

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.

Lifting the fog

Early on in the audio it was difficult to differentiate each word. Stick with it.

longer than it needed to be, well written

long, I skipped the last few chapters, but I love her style of writing and her Zim accent.

Raw and beautiful

I’ve lost two children. This is the most realistic account of grief and being human I’ve yet to read. I feel less alone after having read it.

Beautiful memoir and tribute to her son

Fuller will always be one of my favorite writers. She recounts her grief with rawness and honesty, attempting to make any sense out of heartbreaking loss.

Sweet, deep, perfect

I have been half in love with Alexandra Fuller since the first book of hers I read. This one is different, of course, because of its subject matter. She again opens up completely and frankly, again entertains and instructs, but this time goes far deeper, on a delicate episode of her life that resonates of course to many readers, whether we may have gone through something similar, or we simply aspire to some small portion of her intelligence and sensibility. Thank you, Bo.

Honest

Authors honest. The only thing that is not a bad idea sharing of her deepest depths

Entitlement

I’ve read Fuller since her first book and have become more and more transfixed by her narcissism and sense of entitlement. It makes me sad she lost her son but it would be nice if she mentioned him once in awhile.