Leaving Before the Rains Come / Alexandra Fuller

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, January 2015: The key to a great memoir may be less in the story it tells than in the voice and eye of the storyteller. In Leaving Before the Rains Come, Alexandra Fuller’s third memoir (she also wrote two other books of nonfiction), the author confirms what readers of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight detected on first reading of that debut: Fuller belongs in the pantheon of great memoirists, right alongside Mary Karr, Tobias Wolff, and Frank McCourt. Not unlike those writers, Fuller has a single trope – hers is a childhood spent as a British expat on a farm in revolution-torn southern Africa – that she uses over and over to define and clarify her life The title expression, for example, is a south Africanism for “get out while you can,” and throughout this heartfelt book, she uses experiences, images and memories from her twenty years in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, and from the people she knew there, to illustrate more contemporary and local places and states of mind. Here, the focus is on the men in her life – for one, her heavy-drinking, plain-talking, fatalistic father who says thing like “Those who talk the most, usually have the least to say.” The other is Charlie, her now-ex-husband, an American mainline Philadelphia neo-cowboy who seems at first to be the perfect strong-and-sensitive type, all pragmatism to her barely controlled (but charming) chaos. While the book is ostensibly about their union, and its ultimate dissolution, it is also about memory and childhood and nature and modern life. Charlie and “Bobo” (Fuller’s family nickname, though she is sometimes also called “Al”) live together through elephant attacks (on their first date), malaria (on their wedding day) and relocation (from the wilds of Africa to the tamer wilds of Wyoming) but it is a more prosaic disaster that fells them: the real estate crash of 2008. What exactly went on emotionally between Charlie and Bobo is never fully explained – if you asked her, I’d bet she’d say that’s because she is still trying to figure it out – but the chords of loss she strikes resonate loudly and universally. Still, this is not a depressing book, thanks largely to Fuller’s winsome wit (she thought “mainline Philadelphia” meant that Charlie’s people were heroin addicts who happened to live in Pennsylvania) and unabashed admissions: she had nine novels rejected by publishers before figuring out she should write nonfiction. It’s hard to imagine there’s much more for Fuller to say about her life – and yet, I might have said that after the last memoir. Somehow, always, she finds another thread to weave into another masterpiece. --Sara Nelson