Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

Description

“Fuller brings Africa to life, both its natural splendor and the harsher realities of day-to-day existence, and sheds light on her parents in all their humanness—not a glaring sort of light, but the soft equatorial kind she so beautifully describes in this memoir.” —Bookpage

A story of survival and war, love and madness, loyalty and forgiveness, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is an intimate exploration of Fuller’s parents, whom readers first met in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, and of the price of being possessed by Africa’s uncompromising, fertile, death-dealing land. We follow Tim and Nicola Fuller hopscotching the continent, restlessly trying to establish a home. War, hardship, and tragedy follow the family even as Nicola fights to hold on to her children, her land, her sanity. But just when it seems that Nicola has been broken by the continent she loves, it is the African earth that revives and nurtures her. Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is Fuller at her very best.

Alexandra Fuller is the author of several memoirs: Travel Light, Move Fast, Leaving Before the Rains Come and Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. “Electrifying . . .Writing in shimmering, musical prose . . . Ms. Fuller manages the difficult feat of writing about her mother and father with love and understanding, while at the same time conveying the terrible human costs of the colonialism they supported . . . Although Ms. Fuller would move to America with her husband in 1994, her own love for Africa reverberates throughout these pages, making the beauty and hazards of that land searingly real for the reader.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times 

“Ten years after publishing Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, Alexandra (Bobo) Fuller treats us in this wonderful book to the inside scoop on her glamorous, tragic, indomitable mother . . . Bobo skillfully weaves together the story of her romantic, doomed family against the background of her mother’s remembered childhood.” —The Washington Post 

“Another stunner . . . The writer’s finesse at handling the element of time is brilliant, as she interweaves near-present-day incidents with stories set in the past. Both are equally vivid . . . With Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness Alexandra Fuller, master memoirist, brings her readers new pleasure. Her mum should be pleased.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Fuller’s narrative is a love story to Africa and her family. She plumbs her family story with humor, memory, old photographs and a no-nonsense attitude toward family foibles, follies and tragedy. The reader is rewarded with an intimate family story played out against an extraordinary landscape, told with remarkable grace and style.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[Fuller] conveys the magnetic pull that Africa could exert on the colonials who had a taste for it, the powerful feeling of attachment. She does not really explain that feeling—she is a writer who shows rather than tells—but through incident and anecdote she makes its effects clear, and its costs.” —The Wall Street Journal

“[A]n artistic and emotional feat.” —The Boston Globe

“An eccentric, quixotic and downright dangerous tale with full room for humor, love and more than a few highballs.” —Huffington Post 

“Cocktail Hour [Under the Tree of Forgetfulness] subtly explores the intersections of personality, history, and landscape in ways that are continually fresh and thoughtful.” —Charleston Post and Courier 

“Gracefully recounted using family recollections and photos, the author plumbs the narrative with a humane and clear-eyed gaze—a lush story, largely lived within a remarkable place and time.” —Kirkus Reviews 

“In this sequel to her 2001 memoir, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, which her unflattered mum calls the ‘Awful Book,’ Duller gives a warm yet wry account of her British parents’ arduous life in Africa. . . . With searing honesty and in blazingly vibrant prose, Fuller re-creates her mother’s glorified Kenyan girlhood and visits her forever-wild parents at their Zambian banana and fish farm today. The result is an entirely Awesome Book.” —More Magazine

“Fuller brings Africa to life, both its natural splendor and the harsher realities of day-to-day existence, and sheds light on her parents in all their humanness—not a glaring sort of light, but the soft equatorial kind she so beautifully describes in this memoir.” —Bookpage

“Fuller revisits her vibrant, spirited parents, first introduced in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (2001), which her mother referred to as that ‘awful book’. . . . This time around, Nicola is well aware her daughter is writing another memoir, and shares some of her memories under the titular Tree of Forgetfulness, which looms large by the elder Fullers’ house in Zambia. Fuller’s prose is so beautiful and so evocative that readers will feel that they, too, are sitting under that tree. A gorgeous tribute to both her parents and the land they love.” —Booklist (starred review) 

“A sardonic follow-up to her first memoir about growing up in Rhodesia circa the 1970s, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, this work traces in wry, poignant fashion the lives of her intrepid British parents. . . . Fuller achieves another beautifully wrought memoir.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)Alexandra Fuller was born in England in 1969. In 1972, she moved with her family to a farm in southern Africa. She lived in Africa until her midtwenties. In 1994, she moved to Wyoming.  Fuller is the author of several memoirs, including Travel Light, Move Fast, Leaving Before the Rains Come, and Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. 

Nicola Fuller of Central Africa Learns to Fly

Our Mum—or Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, as she has on occasion preferred to introduce herself—has wanted a writer in the family as long as either of us can remember, not only because she loves books and has therefore always wanted to appear in them (the way she likes large, expensive hats, and likes to appear in them) but also because she has always wanted to live a fabulously romantic life for which she needed a reasonably pliable witness as scribe.

“At least she didn’t read you Shakespeare in the womb,” my sister says. “I think that’s what gave me brain damage.”

“You do not have brain damage,” I say.

“That’s what Mum says.”

“Well, I wouldn’t listen to her. You know what she’s like,” I say.

“I know,” Vanessa says.

“For example,” I say, “lately, she’s been telling me that I must have been switched at birth.”

“Really?” Vanessa tilts her head this way and that to get a better view of my features. “Let me have a look at your nose from the other side.”

“Stop it,” I cover my nose.

US