Review: Alexandra Fuller’s ‘Leaving Before the Rains Come’

Alexandra Fuller has written a divorce memoir for people who may not like divorce memoirs — a group that, she confesses, once included herself. When her own marriage was faltering, she sought solace and advice in secondhand paperback breakup books “that came in the telltale, rippled condition of women on the brink; read in the bath, wept on, or both.” She read these volumes furtively and with “increasing dismay,” abandoning them in the backs of airplane seats and in hotels, “a guilty trail of contagion.” One book disturbed her so much that she “tore it into parts and discarded the fragments in separate gas station garbage bins across South Dakota and Nebraska.”

Leaving Before the Rains Come should meet no such fate. The book is a deeply felt, beautifully written account of the emotional challenges of forging any sort of relationship — between husband and wife, boyfriend and girlfriend, parent and child. It also is a rich portrayal of life in Africa and a raw chronicle about the double-edged sword of independence.

The book is not Fuller’s first memoir, but you need not have read her previous volumes — Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness — to be drawn into her story. In 1972, at age 2, the British-born author moved to what was then Rhodesia, and after that country’s civil war moved to Malawi, then Zambia. Throughout Fuller’s childhood, danger — stray bullets, disease and wild animals — lurked everywhere. Three of her siblings died in their youth, one while in Fuller’s care.

Early on, Fuller “planned for a life of spinsterhood.” And why not, since any suitable man needed to pass the “endurance test” of her family. “Most of the men would flee a day after arriving, sunburned, alcohol-poisoned, savaged by the dogs, and crippled with stomach cramps.” But one did stay: an American named Charlie Ross, who loved polo and whitewater rafting. To Fuller, he seemed that perfect mix of edginess and security. “I believed that if I moored myself to Charlie, I would know tranquility interspersed with organized adventure,” she writes, imagining their future together as Out of Africa “without the plane crashes, syphilis, and Danish accent.”

But after Fuller wilted with malaria while caring for her newborn, the couple decided to move to eastern Idaho. She found herself unable to adjust to an American lifestyle. Then her husband’s real estate business began to falter, and money problems undermined an already crumbling marriage.

So Fuller turned to writing. She wrote nine novels that were rejected by publishers. She gave birth to two more children. She found her voice in writing memoirs and reporting magazine articles from the edge of violence. But none of this could save a marriage that was doomed the moment Fuller left Africa and her eccentric, bullish family.

Fuller is a magnificent, insightful writer, though her “unfiltered outspokenness,” as she puts it, can at times overshadow the other characters. Her husband and children remain thin sketches in the multipart drama that is Alexandra Fuller of southern Africa. She is the grand dame of a rich, tumultuous love story sunk by its outsize, fiercely independent heroine. Her final line — “I was enough” — feels both brave and lonely.

This story was originally published February 6, 2015 at 11:52 AM with the headline "Review: Alexandra Fuller’s ‘Leaving Before the Rains Come’."