I have been traveling for almost five weeks now and not getting in my usual component of reading. However, I did read one book that I’d like to share.
I enjoy well written memoirs, ones that share someone’s life experience in an informed, but not a whining, way. It’s a genre I seek out. Recently I read Leaving Before the Rains Come by Alexandra Fuller. Fuller has written other autobiographical works, one about her mother and another about her childhood.
This book details her marriage to an American and its unraveling over several decades. Fuller had what most of us would call a harrowing, disjointed childhood and it is encapsulated here as she sets the stage for why and how she fell in love with Charlie Ross. Growing up in Zambia and Zimbabwe, a transplanted English child, she experienced war, near starvation, encounters with snakes, frequent moves, and from uncles and family friends, what was most likely sexual abuse. Her parents seem to have been loving, but checked out or oblivious and probably some of both.
Charlie, her boyfriend and then husband, represented and seemed to offer adventure, but also predictability and stability and a grounding she hadn’t ever had. Theirs is a seesawing story of love and heartbreak and two very different personalities ultimately realizing that together they produced more disharmony than happiness.
While I might not like Fuller if I met her, I found it fascinating to inhabit her worldview for a time.
