Leaving Before the Rains Come

November 17, 2014
Thinking back to 1994, when the African-raised Fuller (Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness), her American husband, and their infant daughter left their cottage in Zimbabwe for a life in the mountains of Idaho and Wyoming, she writes, “Our marriage wasn’t going to be about nearly dying, and violent beauty, and unpredictability... sensible decisions, college funds, mortgages, and car payments.” In her newest memoir, Fuller insightfully explores the contrasts between the different landscapes and their corresponding mind-sets, as well as between the safe investment she intended with her marriage and the messy, isolating reality of where the relationship ended. As always, when Fuller describes the African farms of her childhood, her prose vibrates with life and death and dry British sensibility. Equally sharp are her observations about American life and its all-consuming pursuit of convenience and comfort. However, this book also attempts to tackle territory for more familiar to her Western audience—a sad, drawn-out divorce complicated by three adored children and piles of debt. Understandably, the utter banality of the day-to-day proves more difficult for Fuller to enliven with her signature punch. Nonetheless, the rich narration of Fuller’s upbringing, sensibility, and loneliness make clear that she remains one of the most gifted and important memoirists of our time. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency.

November 1, 2014
Fuller (Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, 2012, etc.) resumes her memories of growing up in Africa in this wry, forthright and captivating memoir.This time, the focus is on the slow unraveling of her marriage to a man she thought would save her from her family's madness and chaos. Except for her father's insistence that his children bathe and dress formally for dinner-a gesture toward discipline that emerged nowhere else-Fuller's childhood was as wild as the Zambian landscape. Her father made "absolute, capricious, and patriarchal" rules. Boredom, he announced, was "the worst possible sin." Despite, or perhaps because of, his idiosyncrasies and contradictions, the author idolized him. Her mother, with a family history of mental instability, often succumbed to "long, solo voyages into her dark, grief-disturbed interior," fueled by alcohol. Resembling her physically, Fuller feared that along with "all that Scottish passion," she might inherit madness, as well: "how could I have skipped the place where her ingenuity and passion sat too close to insanity on the spiraling legacy of heritage?" Unsurprisingly, she married an adventurous, dependable man who she thought would provide stability and order. Her husband "was the perfect rescuer," she writes, "and I the most relieved and grateful rescue victim." After a few years in Africa, they moved to America, where living was easier (dependable electricity and running water, for example), unthreatened by political uprisings or rampaging elephants. They had children, but financial pressures, especially after 2008, and her own loneliness gradually took a toll: "Ours had contracted into a grocery-list relationship-finances, children, housekeeping." To reclaim her life, she insisted on divorce. Although her batty and unhinged relatives emerge more vividly than her taciturn husband, Fuller's talent as a storyteller makes this memoir sing.

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Starred review from December 15, 2014
Fuller (Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness, 2011) has elevated the memoir to new levels in her books about her and her family's life in Africa. In her latest, she chronicles a painful time: the collapse of her marriage to the man she wed at age 22. Raised in Zimbabwe and Zambia in the tumultuous 1970s and '80s, Fuller believed she'd found the man who could take on not only her but her family as well when she met Charlie Ross, a sturdy, bearded Wyoming native turned river guide. The pair wed after a year together and started their lives in Africa before moving to Wyoming, where Charlie got a job in real estate and Fuller penned numerous novels and worked odd jobs while raising the couple's three children. But as the years went on, the gap between them widened, and Fuller wrestled with the magnitude of what it meant to separate, then end their marriage. Powerful, raw, and painful, Fuller's writing is so immediate, so vivid that whether she's describing the beauty of Zambia or the harrowing hours following a devastating accident, she leaves the reader breathless. Another not-to-be-missed entry from the gifted Fuller.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2014

In books like her award-winning debut, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Fuller gives us an indelible portrait of Africa as it has defined her personal life. Here she continues in that vein, detailing the breakup of her marriage to an American she met in Zambia, where he ran a rafting business.

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