Travel Light, Move Fast

July 1, 2019
A memoirist reflects on the lessons of her father, a man with an insatiable lust for life. " 'Travel light,' my father always said. 'Move fast,' " writes Fuller (Quiet Until the Thaw, 2017, etc.). "He followed that advice, practiced what he preached, like it was a key tenet of his personal religion." The author's anecdotal tribute to her late father brims with snippets and snatches of Tim Fuller's whirlwind lifestyle. The first part of the narrative covers their time in Budapest, where she and her mother watched as Tim, stricken with pneumonia, died in a hospital bed. As the text progresses, Fuller peels back layer after layer of the character of her father, a highly textured world traveler who navigated life using his own compass. Leaving his native Britain behind, he set out to fight in the Rhodesian Bush War. After meeting his true love and having two daughters, they settled in Zambia, where Tim acquired a banana plantation along the Zambezi River. The author ably chronicles this tumultuous transition era, with its constantly changing governments and economic instability. But at its heart, the book is an intimate character study of a spontaneity-loving wild man who, in his younger years, amused himself swerving his car toward the "do-gooder" foreign aid workers and clearing life's hurdles with a good smoke and a whiskey double. "For him, everything was about time," she writes, "burning through it the way he did." Over the decades, the wily expat continued etching his colorful legend into Zambezi Valley lore as the author made off for America, now a traveler in her own right. Tasked to come to terms with his physical absence, she sifted through a lifetime of memories in order to pen this celebration of the man whose profound influence helped shape her own worldview. Fuller writes gracefully about embracing grief as an indelible part of the human experience. Another elegant memoir from a talented storyteller.

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Starred review from September 2, 2019
Grieving the loss of her father, Fuller (Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight) revisits her tumultuous upbringing “farming in a war zone” during the Rhodesian Bush War in the 1970s through the present day in this arresting memoir. The book opens in 2015 Budapest, where she sits vigil over her father, Tim, in a hospital ICU for 12 days, recalling how his restlessness kept his young family moving from one remote location to another, before he dies. Madcap events involving oddball characters play out as Fuller plans for his cremation and her mother’s return to their farm in Zambia. Four months after Tim’s death, the family gathers to scatter his ashes, and Fuller introduces her fiancé, an American artist she lives with in Wyoming. Old wounds reopen over her “Awful Books”—bestselling memoirs she’s written about the family—and in the aftermath she’s estranged from her sister, her writing stalls, and her engagement breaks off. Just before book’s end, an unforeseen death in July 2018 engulfs her in pain that “would have no end, it would have no shape, it would shape me.” Darkly comic dialogue deepens Fuller’s piercing narrative, yet Tim’s timeless wisdom strikes the most resonant note: “It’ll be all right in the end; if it isn’t all right, it isn’t the end.” Beautifully crafted, Fuller’s moving memoir flows with precision and compassion.

Starred review from July 1, 2019
As she's done since her sublime debut memoir, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (2002), Fuller transports readers to Central Africa where she was raised and where her parents have a sprawling farm. But this time her subject matter is a somber one: the death of her father, the larger-than-life "Tim Fuller of No Fixed Abode." Fuller chronicles his sudden decline on a trip to Budapest with his wife of five decades, Fuller's effervescent mother, Nicola, and Fuller herself. Fuller is deeply saddened by her father dying so far from the land that he loved, but most of this gorgeously written reminiscence is comprised of vignettes from the beautiful life her vivacious parents shared together, focusing on their purchase of a Zimbabwean fish farm at an age when most people would be ready to retire. After four memoirs that chronicle, in whole or in part, Fuller and her family's lives in Africa, her family remains endlessly fascinating and delightful companions for long-time readers and new ones alike. When Fuller reveals an even more devastating loss in the final pages, it's a gut-punch that will leave readers aching for her. A gorgeously written tribute to a life well lived and the resilience of the human spirit in the face of unimaginable loss and grief.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

March 1, 2019

Fuller, whose notable books include two eye-opening memoirs on her early life in southern Africa, returns with a remembrance of her father, Tim, whose unexpected death prompted her to rethink his legacy. Not an easy task, as he himself said during one of their last conversations, "Now that I think about it, maybe there isn't a secret to life."

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