Leaving Before the Rains Come

Stunning. Enthralling. Poignant. Astounding. Jaw-dropping. Witty. Breathtaking. Educational. Awesome. Courageous. Electrifying. Pulverizing. Shimmering. Stunning. Searing. Vibrant. Evocative. I give up, there are not enough adjectives for me to use to describe Fuller's incredible memoirs of her and her family's life/experiences in Africa - many of these adjectives have been used in many of the wonderful Editorial Reviews.Although each of Fuller's three memoirs can be read as 'stand alones', part of me would recommend reading them in the order they were written. Firstly, "Let's Not Go To The Dogs Tonight", then "Cocktails Under the Tree of Forgetfulness", then "Leaving Before the Rains Come" (the latter incidentally is a South Africanism for 'get out while you can'). How could one NOT read these memoirs based solely on their titles and book covers????I, however, read the second memoir first, could not download the third one fast enough, and am just embarking on the first one, which describes Fuller's growing-up years in Africa. I am addicted to Fuller's family and their heart-wrenching journeys.Fuller's second memoir ("Cocktails...") was written 10 years after her first. In the second, she provides greater details about her unbelievable mother and her mother's remembered childhood. (Fuller's mother called the first memoir 'The Awful Book'!). As one reviewer put it: "This narrative is a love story to Africa and Fuller's family'. "Cocktails..." is written at a point whereby Fuller visits her parents at their Zambian banana and fish farm. The memories are shared by her mother under the Tree of Forgetfulness which is right outside the parents' home. But oh so much more is shared about the family and experiences.The third memoir ("Leaving....") chronicles Fuller's life in Wyoming (where she moved with her husband who is from Boston whom she met in Africa) and the circumstances surrounding the eventual dissolution of their marriage. Oh but there are such astounding revelations in this memoir of Fuller & Charlie's experiences in Africa before winding up in Wyoming. The description of her husband's accident and the aftermath rivals anything I've ever read - I was gutted.Fuller's interweaving of past and current events is seamless (I personally have no issue with an author going back and forth in time, interjecting fascinating side roads to the story).I for one was so ignorant going into the reads about Zambia, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, all other places referenced, the history of the colonials, etc. I had to have a map next to me from the very beginning.I shall forever be shaking my head at the trials/tribulations Fuller's parents chose to endure while living through all that happened while living in Africa - and chose not to leave. You will cry and you will laugh at the parents' 'personalities'.Then there is Fuller's writing. Oh. My. God. Even throughout all the stories, the geography, the surreal occurrences, it's the writing that brought me to my knees. I will never get to Africa, but thanks to Fuller - I've now been there.Always always, throughout all three memoirs, is Fuller's visceral, unending bond to Africa. It's in her blood, her soul, and one wonders if she ultimately will finish out her future final days there. We avid fans of her can only hope that Fuller's third memoir will not be her last.

This is the first book of hers that I have read and I am eager to go back and read the earlier ones. What struck me most was the honesty and self critical view she takes as she examines her adult life and her marriage. The contrasts between Africa and America become almost a metaphor for the yearning spiritual self in Africa of her childhood and the controlled, mundane life of her home in Wyoming. As another reviewer has written, there were many things left unsaid and I kept asking myself questions while I read the book. What was really the problem with her husband? I understand that he had his wounds and scars but outside of hearing about his family for a few generations back, we never really understood why he vexed her so much and how he held her back from who she wanted to be. I picked up clues like stoic, grounded, and impatient with her when she wasn't interested in finances. Also, he struggled to earn money and they never seemed to get together and make a plan about what to do financially.Or with their lives as a couple. So we had to go on faith that her husband just wasn't right for her through her eyes only although she mostly painted him in a very understanding and sympathetic light. Whenever he did get frustrated with her, she implied that she was often at fault as well.Her relationship with her parents was quite well portrayed and as a reader you really got to understand them even if you didn't always agree with their parenting styles. I think in other parts of the world, parents accept that they have to fend for themselves and ultimately so do their children so they don't worry too much about many things that we worry about in the US. Certainly, as a girl whenever we visited my relatives in India, especially the ones who lived in more remote villages, the parenting and the attitudes towards child rearing were more similar.to what she described in Africa. Also, the emotions being at the surface and the group sympathy where people spoke of their troubles is quite common there. Here, I often feel that people that you meet are very hung up on not burdening anyone with their troubles mostly because they want you to believe that they don't have any. (And yes, as a doctor, I get to speak to people more privately and see that they all have troubles...)I was intrigued by the perception that in her childhood she and her parents had to accede to the fact that catastrophes can just happen to you and you have to roll with it if you make it.However, in England and America, she felt that people demanded more control over their surroundings and believed that they had it. However, there are many parts of America, especially poor inner city areas, where people still live with a more fatalistic attitude.Her mental health and how it pervades her life and her sense of self was very interesting. she is clear that many family members, including her mother suffer from depression or perhaps bipolar disease. With this revelation, she is liberated and can relate observations about her self, her relationships, her struggles from a unique perspective such as when she describes being caught in rainbows of the emotional prism of the man that she has an affair with.I have a deep sense of respect for someone who can be so brutally honest and hard on themselves in order to understand what they want from their lives and what makes them happy. It is well-deserved.

I am an Alexandra Fuller fan. I loved Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness. When I picked up this book, I didn't realize that it was such a raw account of her life, specifically her marriage. Fuller does not hold back when describing the great highs and overwhelming lows of her life in Africa, or the idiosyncrasies of her family (especially her parents and grandparents). In this book, she leaves Africa for the US (Idaho, Utah and Wyoming) and takes us on the fateful journey of her 19 year marriage. There were times I wasn't sure if I wanted to root for her or for her husband. While she seems like a decent person, I'm not sure she would be easy to be married to. I get the very real sense that there is no way to separate Africa from Ms. Fuller. The influence of her childhood is much too great. As a consequence, I'm not sure she will ever be fulfilled in America or with anyone who doesn't continually seek and provide great adventures like her father. For fans of Fuller, and authors similar to Peter Godwin (Mukiwa, When a Crocdile Eats the Sun) this is a very good read. I highly recommend it.

I have not read Alexandra Fuller's first two memoirs recounting her unusual childhood in Rhodesia. So I came to this chapter of her life, without foreknowledge of her rather chaotic family life. This is her story of meeting Charlie Ross, an American adventurer in Africa who seemed a true exception the usual cliches applied to Americans abroad by more permanently settled Westerners. After a short courtship, marriage and a baby followed quickly. Interweaving vignettes from her own family history with stories taken from Charlie's equally interesting (although far more stable and conventional) ancestry, the author tells the rather sad tale of a marriage unravelling over two continents, three children and nearly twenty years. It illustrates the clash between what Alexandra calls a 'black and white' style of living... and her own experience of living life on the edge. In the beginning, Charlie seemed like the calm, 'black and white' anchor she craved after a childhood spent with her fairly alcoholic, reckless, often impoverished and truly eccentric parents. But as the years go by, Charlie and Alexandra's differing approaches to life open a rift between them that proves impossible to mend. As an American who has lived abroad for over 30 years, I found her comments about the cultural clash very interesting. I have observed Americans becoming obsessively risk-averse in the decades since I left. This is one of the aspects of American life that the author finds difficult - and easy to understand given her background. This memoir is really the story of two people attracted to each other by their differences... the same differences that would eventually drive them apart. Alexandra Fuller is a very good writer and I look forward to reading her other books!

Alexandra Fuller's acclaimed debut memoir:' Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight ' told the story of her wonderfully shambolic childhood and of the years she spent growing up in Rhodesia in the 1970s; her follow-up memoir:' Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness ' continued in a similar vein, but focused mostly on the life of her rather eccentric mother, Nicola. In this third instalment 'Leaving Before the Rains Come' which follows on from where 'Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight' left off, we learn a little more about the author's parents and their rackety, disordered life, but this memoir focuses mostly on the breakdown of Alexandra's marriage to husband Charlie Ross, with whom she has three children. The author was 22 and living with her family in Zambia when she met and fell almost immediately in love with Charlie, an American who ran canoeing and white-water rafting operations on the Zambezi River. Six months later they were engaged, and six months after that, they were married on the Fuller family farm.Married life began in a rented house on the outskirts of Lusaka - with room for four ponies, a vegetable garden and a gardener, who spent more time tending his personal marijuana crop than Alexandra's vegetable patch - but it soon became apparent that neither Alexandra nor Charlie were quite what they each expected the other person to be. Charlie, the author tells us, viewed her as: " a wild version of himself, a Westerner in the raw. But now that he had married me, and I was out of my natural habitat, my plumage was less shiny, my skills less useful, my constant noise less charming." For her part, Alexandra admits that although she wanted a ticket out of the disorder of her parents' rackety existence and felt she would be safe "docked to the steady command centre that was Charlie" found herself feeling imprisoned and suffocated. After the birth of their first child and Alexandra's subsequent almost fatal dose of malaria, the Rosses left Africa for America - although the author tells us that the whole truth of them leaving Zambia was not only because she had almost died, but because the reality of the country had not matched Charlie's vision of how it should have been. Almost twenty years later, after two more children and the floundering of Charlie's real estate business, Alexandra's and Charlie's shaky marriage finally entered its death throes - but then something happened which forced both of them decide what they really wanted from life.As in her previous two memoirs, Alexandra Fuller writes with honesty, insight and an 'unfiltered outspokenness' which draws her readers right into her life story and makes this memoir an absorbing if, at times, a rather sad read. Although this account of a disintegrating marriage is not one that I enjoyed quite as much as the author's two previous memoirs, it was an involving read, it certainly had its amusing and lighter moments and the sections of the book which focused on Alexandra's parents' relatives were both interesting and entertaining, especially the story of Alexandra's maternal grandmother who emptied her chamber pot over her husband when he became too amorous: "You need to empty it over their heads only once" she told Alexandra."They won't pester you without your permission after that." When Alexandra's father learnt that after years of heavy drinking and smoking he might have ten years longer to live than he expected, he delightedly told her: "Well then, I should start misspending my youth. Hooray!" And when asked by his bank manager what contingencies he had made for his old age, Alexandra's father replied: " A bloody good, permanently fatal dose of malaria." So although this memoir's intended focus may be the story of a failed marriage, Alexandra's wonderfully eccentric family still take centre stage - and thank heavens for that. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs TonightCocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

I enjoyed Leaving Before The Rains Come so much and when I wasn't reading it I was thinking about it. Surely a good sign. I liked the style and the way the past and the present weaved in and out of each other. I loved Alexandra Fuller's honesty and her direct way of telling her story. I didn't feel I was reading a book so much as the author was with me, telling me her story over a cup of coffee in her kitchen, or sitting on the bank by an African river, or walking together in the shadow of the rocky mountains. I have read all her previous books and this one didn't disappoint. So much of the book resonated with me and I was truly sorry when I found there were no more pages to turn. I wanted to know what happened next?

I first heard Alexandra Fuller's writing when it was the Woman's Hour Book of the Week. It interested me, not so much because it was a 'divorce memoir', but because I recognised in her experience of leaving Africa, in my own experience. This led me first to her book 'Don't Let's Go the Dogs Tonight' which was wonderful. I read 'Leaving' straight afterwards, and fortunately none of the material is repeated. Her prose is fluid and enveloping, carrying the reader through the inexorable decline in her marriage. The only irritation was the somewhat self-important digressions into her and her husband's background. They served a purpose but rapidly started to grate and gave me a feeling of being talked at, rather than to. In general, a well-crafted and entertaining book full of acute observations on family life and marriage, which could be enjoyed by a reader at any stage in life.

I laughed, I cried. This is one of the best autobiographies I've ever read. No superfluous wordiness; absolutely, sometimes painfully, honest and quite astounding, but I don't want to spoil your read. Read this volume first, to get the full on effect, because "Don't let's go to the dogs tonight" will give away something in this book, which stands alone anyway. To read the set is good, though. You won't want to put it down. You will be ordering the rest. Do it before you finish the first!