Leaving Before the Rains Comes

Looking to rebuild after a painful divorce, Alexandra Fuller turns to her African past for clues to living a life fully and without fear

A child of the Rhodesian wars and daughter of two deeply complicated parents, Alexandra Fuller is no stranger to pain. But the disintegration of Fuller's own marriage leaves her shattered. Looking to pick up the pieces of her life, she finally confronts the tough questions about her past, about the American man she married, and about the family she left behind in Africa. A breathtaking achievement, Leaving Before the Rains Come is a memoir of such grace and intelligence, filled with such wit and courage, that it could only have been written by Alexandra Fuller.

Leaving Before the Rains Come begins with the dreadful first years of the American financial crisis when Fuller's delicate balance-between American pragmatism and African fatalism, the linchpin of her unorthodox marriage-irrevocably fails. Recalling her unusual courtship in Zambia-elephant attacks on the first date, sick with malaria on the wedding day-Fuller struggles to understand her younger self as she overcomes her current misfortunes. Fuller soon realizes what is missing from her life is something that was always there: the brash and uncompromising ways of her father, the man who warned his daughter that "the problem with most people is that they want to be alive for as long as possible without having any idea whatsoever how to live." Fuller's father-"Tim Fuller of No Fixed Abode" as he first introduced himself to his future wife-was a man who regretted nothing and wanted less, even after fighting harder and losing more than most men could bear.

Leaving Before the Rains Come showcases Fuller at the peak of her abilities, threading panoramic vistas with her deepest revelations as a fully grown woman and mother. Fuller reveals how, after spending a lifetime fearfully waiting for someone to show up and save her, she discovered that, in the end, we all simply have to save ourselves. An unforgettable book, Leaving Before the Rains Come is a story of sorrow grounded in the tragic grandeur and rueful joy only to be found in Fuller's Africa.

The following excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof

Copyright © 2014 Alexandra Fuller

Dad says he's going to die next week," Vanessa said. The phone line from Zambia was good for once. No echoing, no hopping, no static. Still, I felt the distancing power of the whole of the Atlantic Ocean between us.

"Say that again," I said.

"Dad," repeated Vanessa loudly and slowly, as if she were an Englishwoman-on-vacation in the tropics. "He says he's not going to bat some other chap's innings. He says it's not cricket." I heard her light a cigarette: the scrape and hiss of a match; the singe of burning tobacco; the capacious inhale. I recognized we were in danger of doing things on Vanessa's indolent schedule. She would be there south of the equator cultivating nonchalance. I would be here north of it conscious of time-lapsing deadlines.

"Why?" I asked. "Of what?"

"The Bible," Vanessa said, calmly exhaling.

"Oh," I said. "Well, no one in their right mind takes the Bible literally."

"I do," Vanessa said.

"Exactly," I triumphed.

I pictured Vanessa at the picnic table on her veranda, a generous helping of South African white wine in front of her. Mosquitoes would be whining around her ankles poisonously. She'd be wiping sweat off her nose, pushing panting dogs away from her lap. I could also hear the rainy-?season chorus of Southern Hemisphere woodland-?living birds in the background. The tyranny of a Heuglin's robin, some chattering masked weavers, and a Sombre bulbul shouting over and over, "Willie! Come out and fight! Willie! Come out and fight! Scaaared."

Meanwhile the austerity of winter was still hanging on here. Outside my office window, there were tiny beams of frozen mud showing through tall snowbanks. The only birds I could see were an industrious banditry of black-?capped chickadees at the suet feeder. They seemed robustly ascetic little creatures, like tiny chattering monks. I'd read they are able to lower their body temperature by up to a dozen degrees on cold winter nights to conserve energy. Torpor was the word the bird books used. Hummingbirds supposedly did the same thing, but they also had to eat sixty times their body weight a day just to stay alive, at least according to a fragment of a poem by Charles Wright I kept above my computer. "Now that's a life on the edge," the fragment concludes.

"I have to go," I said.

But Vanessa had begun to expand on her vision for Dad's funeral arrangements and she was in full voice now. Should there be an old Land Rover or a donkey cart for a hearse? And was that Polish priest from Old Mkushi still alive, the one who had been at my wedding? Because he had lived in

the bush long enough not to blink if we asked him to have the service under a baobab tree instead of in a church, right? And perhaps we could get people from the villages to make a choir. "There are heaps of those Apostles all over the place," Vanessa pointed out. "But do they sing, or do they just sit around draped in white bedsheets, moaning?"

I said I didn't know, but I'd never forget the time Mum got in a dustup with the Apostle who had moved onto the edge of the farm with his several wives and his scores of children and whose vegetable plot had strayed onto her overflowing pet cemetery. Mum had yelled obscenities, planted her walking stick in the soil, and declared turf war. In return, the Apostle had thrown rocks at Mum's surviving dogs, brandished his staff, and recited bellicose passages from the Old Testament. "An apoplectic apostolic," Mum had reported with relish, although her neck had been out for weeks after the Apostle shook her, "just like Jack Russell with a rat."

Vanessa took another considered drag off her cigarette. "Oh right," she said. "I'd forgotten about that. Maybe Catholics might be better after all. They'll know proper hymns. Plus Catholics have wine at intermission, don't they? And Mum d