The Penguin Podcast is back! Listen Now
Fi

Fi

A Memoir of My Son

Summary

The story of a mother grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child - from the award-winning and bestselling memoirist of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

'Truly extraordinary' HELEN MACDONALD

‘A profound and gripping memoir about surviving unexpected, devastating loss’ SUNDAY TIMES

‘A mesmeric celebration... Will help others surviving loss — surviving life' NEW YORK TIMES

It’s midsummer in Wyoming and Alexandra Fuller 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.

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. 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.

Reviews

  • Life writers often want to be likeable. Fuller’s not in that camp: rawly bereft, she doesn’t care how she comes across… It’s no easy ride in her company, but that’s the point: she doesn’t spare us the pain inflicted by “the sharp knife of a short life”
    Guardian

About the author

Alexandra Fuller

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.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more