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

I want to read the memoirist who is uneasy with ease. The one who doubles back, isn’t sure, scuffs the page with maybe. Who knows something of the art of digression. Who yields to the calamity of self-examination, who is dissuaded by the possibility of perfection, who dissolves the conventions of time. Life hurtles forward. Memory blows back. The memoirist lifts her butterfly net with Nabokovian intent.

And so here is Alexandra Fuller, three memoirs in, rubbed raw with history. Fuller’s first memoir, “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” presented readers with the unstinting rollick of her African childhood. Her second, “Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness,” deepened our understanding of the parents, and country, that raised her. Her third, “Leaving Before the Rains Come,” circles back and through to the man she marries in the final pages of “Dogs.” “Rains” remembers the shock and awe of early love. It traces the dissolution of bonds.

Whereas “Dogs” is a good yarn, a fixed chronology, a tale told with the wide-eyed, quickened pace of a childlike present tense (a voice that works less well as Fuller’s grows older on the page), “Rains” is tangled, vibrant, skeining. It is an excavation of meaning rendered in a wizened past tense. It is a book of associative parts and tumbled tangents, in which memory is consulted not for the order of things but for their significance. Fuller is in pursuit not just of answers, in “Rains,” but of the clarifying questions themselves.

She wants to understand, for example, why, having finally chosen to leave the chaos of her childhood for the imagined “certainties, safety nets, and assurances” of the man she loves, she does not find peace. She is not so much obsessed with blame as she is with unanticipated inevitabilities.

“Dogs” placed readers in the audience of Fuller: Come gather round and listen to my tale, it seemed to insist. “Rains,” on the other hand, asks for — and must be given — readerly companionship. Deliberately, repeatedly, Fuller writes inclusively of the journey she is on. Her lyric — and make no mistake, this book is one extremely gorgeous lyric — rides the parabola of I and we, me and us. Here is Fuller, in the early pages, falling in love with her Charlie:

Time took on a weird dimension too — eternity possessed in an instant. Having invented it, we tend to believe that everything happens over time, the way the seasons ease their way around the globe steady and measurable and relaxed. But the truth is, most of the things that change the course of our lives happen in fleeting unguarded moments; grief buckling us at the knees; fear shattering through us like buckshot; love pulling us out on an unseen tide. And finding ourselves in the grip of these overpowering emotions, we then invent reasons based on the flimsy evidence we have accrued why they have happened, trying to make sense of the insensible with armloads of self-justification, distortions, and deliberate misinterpretations.

That’s Fuller’s story. But couldn’t it also be yours? If not, how about this: “I thought of how it isn’t impossible, but it’s overwhelmingly daunting and perhaps even pointless to construct a viable future from an imperfect past.”

Is it preposterous to think you might replace a culture and a country with a partner? Can the signs of impending doom be discerned only in retrospect, in the caution of a grandmother, in the “nighttime miracle of birds, secretly stitching together south and north with their hunger, with their collective, insistent, mounting realization of being in the wrong place at the wrong time”? Can the child who grows up on a landscape of terrible and terrifying beauty ultimately settle for a life that is “good and ordinary and sane”? Can we tamp down — must we tamp down — our electrifying extremes?

It is true that we hardly know Charlie, Fuller’s ex-husband, after we close the pages of this book. Fuller has shared but a handful of emblematic anecdotes, a quick summary of disputes, a short list of complaints, a navigational map to the remarkable differences that divided these two only-ever parallel souls from almost the start. It could also be argued that some of Fuller’s tangents feel false and merely discursive.

And yet all of that must be forgiven, for Fuller, with “Rains,” is not interested in gossip, in the he said/she said that defines most amateur memoir. She is interested in the hard evaluation of her own divided nature, in the unglamorous reality of possible insanity, in the pliable nature of self, in the ultimately inviolable “I.” She is winding and unwinding her way toward knowing.

It’s what we do in our real lives, and one of the hardest things to do on the page.

Beth Kephart, the author of 19 books, teaches memoir at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Leaving Before the Rains Come”

By Alexandra Fuller, Penguin, 258 pages, $26.95