The story of a mother grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child - from the award-winning and bestselling memoirist of Don''t Let''s Go to the Dogs Tonight
** Pulitzer Prize Finalist 2025 in Memoir/Autobiography **
''Truly extraordinary'' HELEN MACDONALD
‘A profound and gripping memoir about surviving unexpected, devastating loss’ SUNDAY TIMES
‘A mesmeric celebration... Will help others surviving loss — surviving life'' NEW YORK TIMES
It’s midsummer in Wyoming and Alexandra Fuller is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, reeling from a midlife breakup, freshly sober and piecing her way uncertainly through a volatile new relationship with a younger woman, Alexandra vows to get herself back on even keel.
And then - suddenly and incomprehensibly - her son Fi, at twenty-one years old, dies in his sleep.
From a sheep wagon deep in the mountains of Wyoming to a grief sanctuary in New Mexico to a silent meditation retreat in Alberta, Canada, Alexandra journeys up and down the spine of the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to find how to grieve herself whole. By turns disarming, devastating and unexpectedly, blessedly funny, Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grieving a child in a culture that has no instructions for it.