Fi: A Memoir
Alexandra Fuller’s “gutting” new memoir is “as hard to pick up as it is to put down,” said Marion
Winik in The Washington Post. The author of the 2001 best-seller Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight lost her only son, Fi, at 21, when he died in his sleep shortly after the onset of seizures that a doctor had dismissed as nothing to be concerned about. Countless other mothers lose their children every year, Fuller reminds us. Her own mother, while raising a family in 1970s Rhodesia, lost one child at birth, another in infancy, and a third as a toddler. But that personal knowledge didn’t make Charles “Fi” Fuller Ross less beloved than he was, and it didn’t make Fuller’s grief less acute. When I closed this book, “I was moved and devastated yet somehow strengthened.”
Fuller’s writing here, as always, is “a knife pointed straight at the heart,” said Celia McGee in Air Mail. We see Fi as an athlete and leader and the adored middle child to two sisters. We see how, following his death, Fuller’s days were “measured in pain.” Fuller’s writing here is at times less precise and unflinching than usual, and her descriptions of the meditation and grief retreats she avails herself of “can seem a smidgen enamored of entitlement,” extensions of the privileged life she has constructed for herself in Wyoming. But “Fi is about climbing back to belief—any kind of belief—one rung at a time.” And you don’t begrudge her any relief she finds.
“In the hands of another memoirist, the story of Fi might be unbearably sad,” said David Sheff in The New York Times. “But this book is a mesmeric celebration of a boy who died too soon, a mother’s love and her resilience,” and it will even make you laugh, or, more precisely, laugh-cry. “The wit in this memoir is soul-piercing,” and it smooths the way as we witness this wise woman and “sublime” writer move through the stages of her grief to an acceptance that life will never be the same for her again. Though her account spares us none of the pain she suffered, “it will help others surviving loss—surviving life.”