Writing to Survive

Alexandra Fuller has long made loss her gain. Starting in 2001 with her first memoir, the terrifyingly fine Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, she has done the emotional math and kept score of her life. How could she not?

She grew up a child of the imploding British Empire—and of two gorgeously reckless parents—in southern Africa. Her sentimental education was the war that violently birthed Zimbabwe from Rhodesia and her family’s drift from one belly-up land venture to the next, with round-the-clock cocktails and a “confetti” of Jack Russell terriers their preferred haze against inopportune realities, lingering trauma, and mental collapse.