On her own
When Alexandra Fuller felt her marriage beginning to collapse, she reached for a cocktail of secrecy, frugality and communion. As she writes in “Leaving Before the Rains Come,” her recipe was simple: buy secondhand divorce memoirs online, chug them down q
“I had begun to give up on these books at the first mention of a woman collapsing with grief on the kitchen or the bathroom floor. Why always these two rooms? Couldn’t anyone fall over anywhere more comfortable?”
In time, however, the cliches were the things that stuck. “I discovered that women dissolve in these two places for good reason: the kitchen because it is the place from which we have nurtured our soon-to-be devastated families, and the bathroom because it is private.”
Perhaps because the first is fairly self-explanatory, Fuller focuses her attention on the second, more nebulous space, on questions of solitude and selfhood and the sexes. Contemplating divorce, she wonders what it means to be truly alone, self-sustaining. She wonders, too, if women are prepared for this sort of state as much as men are. Married in her early 20s, with three children following, a private, selfcontained world of her own now seems equally desirable and unsettling to Fuller. A child of Africa, she finds herself musing on signal flags, especially the one known as Lima. “It meant, ‘This ship is quarantined,’ ” she explains, adding, “I liked the word, quarantine, and all the protective cover it implied.”
If anyone were prepared to go it alone, Fuller seems a likely candidate. As she writes in “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood,” her best-selling 2001 memoir about growing up in central Africa during Rhodesia’s merciless civil war, she is not accustomed to being coddled. Raised by free-spirited and frequently drunken British expats, this is a person who has served militiamen tea, shot an FN rifle and seems a little too comfortable around rats. You think she could handle her own checkbook.
And yet, looking back at her family, her country, she sees that nothing really equipped her for such practicalities. Where she came from, women may be loud and they may be opinionated, but the safety was in men — burly, sturdy men like Charlie, her American hus- band. “For these reasons,” she writes, “it hadn’t seemed rash and fool-hardy to have married him at twenty-three. On the contrary, it seemed as if not marrying Charlie would have been a rash and foolhardy decision. My marrying him would mean I’d be all right forever.”
The marriage collapsed along somewhat predictable lines. After years in America, Fuller finds herself longing for Africa’s color, its spontaneity and sense of abandon, however reckless and forbidding it sometimes is. Her new home and her husband seem stifling in comparison, fueled by a never-ending — and ultimately fruitless — need for more. In the end, despite years of hard work, nothing in their adopted state of Wyoming seems more secure for it: not their house, their jobs, their marriage. A decision must be made.
It comes, as these things often do, slowly. We feel Fuller as she is understandably sidelined by trial separations and the occasional good time. At other moments, however, another type of restless undercurrent surfaces — a throat clearing of sorts, as if she is loath to get to the point. Extended sections about how family members and acquaintances dealt with loss generations ago can feel tangential at times, making one wonder if Fuller is afraid of confronting the topic at hand — which is not, in the end, her old landlady back in Africa or even her wayward grandmother, but the person who fathered her children and slept beside her for years and years.
That is not to say that Fuller is oblivious to this predicament — in a more profound way, for her, fear itself is the heart of the matter. If she married Charlie in part for a sense of security, divorce effectively eliminates that. Toward the ending, after a particularly jarring incident (to put it mildly), Fuller unravels her feelings in an exquisite meditation on what it means to be alone — on the courage it can inspire, as well as the sometimes undeniable sense of sorrow. Here the fear arises again, but this time she takes it in her hand and smartly wraps it in nothing — no pretty paper, no apologies.
In the final pages, she finds herself visiting her father in Africa. He is giving her his hard-nosed version of a pep talk, reminding her that life isn’t supposed to be easy.
“Easy is just another way of knowing you aren’t doing much in the way of your life,” he tells her. “But you’re doing it.” To which her only reply is, “Sometimes.”