Fearless non-fiction

Bestselling author Alexandra Fuller on writing books that nearly kill you 

Alexandra Fuller’s bestselling  book Don’t Lets Go To The Dogs Tonight was an incredibly visceral and demanding debut, but she’s of the opinion that the only book worth writing is the one that nearly kills you, so the journey was one that she wholeheartedly embraced.

Because of the autobiographical nature of the book it proved to be a difficult read for her mother, and even in Fuller’s latest work of non-fiction Cocktail Hour Under The Tree Of Forgetfulness, Fuller has her mother repeatedly (and rather humorously, at times)  referring to Don’t Lets Go To The Dogs Tonight  as “that Awful Book”.

“It really was my story, even though my mother thought it was hers,” says Fuller, basking in the sun and sipping away at the “bath” of rooibos tea she has just ordered. “What was hard for her, I think,  was that I had exposed her real grief. I think she thought that she had given the world such a brave face, and I had shown that behind closed doors she had dissolved.”

Her latest book, however, is one that her mother –  “Nicola Fuller of Central Africa”, she’ll have you know – loves.

“OK, she doesn’t love it, she accepts it and she’s fine with it,” admits Fuller with a laugh and a long pull of her cigarette. Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness revisits some of the childhood happenings that Fuller documents in Don’t Lets Go To The Dogs Tonight, but really the author says the book is a counterargument of sorts. 

“I am always curious about the way that being attached identity creates conflict and violence, every book I write seems to be along those themes, but this book is also  an impatient rebuttal to all of those silly books out there saying ‘oh, how I grew up in Africa and I had to leave because there was no place for me there’. Actually no, you didn’t have to leave because you’re white, you had to leave because you refused to be African. That’s my answer.”

Although Fuller says she threatens that in her next book “nobody will die”  and she  “will make it all up”, she also acknowledges that the truths and stories that find her are clearly the content that she has been put on earth to tell. “My cerebral self says I’d love to do fiction, but then I get out of bed and say ‘I’m  yours, what’s the story?’ and truth just keeps coming,” she explains.

“Death is part of life, and yes it’s tragic. There is nothing more tragic than a mother losing her children, but I think especially living in the States where you realise people are so allergic to the idea of dying that they shove their faces full of botox – they are constantly trying to fight age or death – you need to accept that  it’s going to happen.”

For readers that applauded Fuller’s last book, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, for the way in which the author stripped off labels such as “feminist, vegetarian, liberal,  white, African and British”, then the stripping off of the label of daughter in Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness proves to be one of her greatest conquests yet.

 

“Peeling off label of daughter and just hearing my mother was probably one of the hardest things about writing the book,” she says. “But the gift of writing is that you get to do your million little deaths while you’re living.”

This article first appeared in CitiVibe in The Citizen on Thursday 13 October 2011.

Alexandra Fuller’s Cocktail Hour Under The Tree Of Forgetfulness (ISBN: 9780857201287) is available now.