Travel Light, Move Fast by Alexandra Fuller

Travel Light, Move Fast Reviews

• 
  Diane S ☔

  Anyone who has read this authors non fiction before knows she had a very unorthodox upbringing. Her books chronicle different aspects, often humorous, episodes of her life in Africa. Although this book opens with her father's death, which is a sad occurrence since he died away from the home he loved, the tone of the book is not. Fuller relates in a series of vignettes, the many amusing ways her parents had of surviving together. I laughed so many times, two very different people, but characters both, her parents were definitely unique, as was the way they lived. So grieving yes, as she and her mother return to Africa, but laughter admidst the tears.
  
  The ending though, an update on Fuller herself and her life following her father's death, is plain heartbreaking. Even more so is something else that happens at books end. Laughter and tears, what lives are made of, the full circle. Fuller is such a fantastic writer, at least in her non fiction. She is honest, clear and forthright. She puts it all out there, the proverbial good, bad and the ugly.
  
  An emotionally difficult read at books end, but how lucky to be able to express both ones happiness and grief in words. A truly interesting, inspirational and stirring read.
  
  ARC from Edelweiss
• 
  Chrissie

  This autobiography comes across as being very personal. I get the feeling Alexandra Fuller is writing more for herself than for us, her readers.
  
  The book is about grief. It is about getting over the death of someone close to your heart. On a short trip to Budapest with her mother and father, Alexandra’s father dies. The year is 2015. He is seventy-five. Pneumonia was the rapid cause of death. Over a handful of days, she watches over her father, sitting by his side in a hospital, in a country that is not home. Her mother, four years younger than her father, is profoundly shaken. Alexandra must take charge. Eventually, with her father’s ashes in an urn they fly home. Home being her mother’s farm in rural Zambia. Home for Alexandra was then Wyoming. She had been married, divorced and had at this point three kids.
  
  Ask yourself--do calamities come one at a time? Rarely. This is a word of warning. More problems arise.
  
  In the book, Alexandra reminisces about her parents’ lives, about her own life as a kid growing up in Africa, her present-day life in America and her sister’s life. She thinks about how she has been raised. She had been taught, if anything, that she had to stick out her chin and c-o-p-e with whatever life threw at her.
  
  As said, Alexandra reminisces about her childhood in central and southern Africa, in what is now Zimbabwe and Zambia. Her parents were British settlers in pre-war Rhodesia. Life was tough and they were constantly on the move. You get an intimate feel for the hardships endured by the family. Much of this has been drawn in Alexandra’s earlier books, but here we see how she views her parents now, herself an adult. The tables have been turned; rather than they caring for her, she must take care of them.
  
  Alexandra Fuller has a unique prose style. Her words capture both life’s irony, comedy and grief. Tears and laughter. She is forthright. She digs under the surface to lay bare emotions. While I admire her for having the guts to do this, to lay all bare, I still feel she is writing more for herself than for us. I can also understand why those of her family hate her books. She puts not only herself but them too out on display.
  
  One can ask if there is any big lesson to be drawn from this book. Life is as it is and you cope because you have no other choice.
  
  Alexandra’s deep love for Africa resonates. I love how she describes Africa. I wanted more of Africa, more new information about Africa, in this book.
  
  The author reads the audiobook. She does this very well. She captures how her parents really were through apt intonations. I suppose this comes naturally to her; she remembers how they spoke, and she knows who they were. There is an undeniable Britishness to both. Her mother did not like wimps. You hear this. Her father loved a party. You hear this too. The personality of each comes through loud and strong. Four stars for the author’s narration.
  
  
  **************************
  
  *
  Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood 5 stars
  *
  Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness 5 stars
  *
  Scribbling the Cat 5 stars
  *
  Travel Light, Move Fast 3 stars
  *
  The Legend of Colton H. Bryant 3 stars
  *
  Quiet Until the Thaw 1 star
  *
  Leaving Before the Rains Come wish-list
• 
  Kati Polodna

  I’ll read anything by Alexandra Fuller. She’s so damn compelling. Her writing is incredible.
• 
  Julie

  Achingly beautiful and bewildering, Travel Light, Move Fast is the fourth of Alexandra Fuller's memoirs of her fascinating, roughly-hewn and tragic family. This most recent volume is a portrait of her father, Tim, who at the story's opening lies dying in a Budapest hospital. Fuller leaves her Wyoming homestead to join her mother in this ancient, sweltering city on the Danube that is suddenly teeming with Syrian refugees. From this jolting perspective, the author returns us to the landlocked south central African nation of Zambia, where her parents farm fish and bananas.
  
  Anyone familiar with Alexandra Fuller's previous memoirs will need little introduction to and realignment with her peripatetic, dipsomaniac parents and their post-colonial tragic-comic adventures in southeastern Africa. Yet there is more story to mine in their rich lives. Travel Light, Move Fast delves deeply into Tim Fuller's past and his psyche, a heretofore scrappy silhouette beside the force of nature that is Alexandra's mother, Nicola.
  
  This is a narrative deeply riven by grief and mended together with sustaining, unconditional love. Fuller examines her parents' marriage with empathy and wonder, and the reader marvels at the couples' ability to remain whole despite the loss of three children, a country, multiple homes, and family fortunes. Their senses of humor, place, and their utter adoration of each other — Nicola and Tim Fuller created their own country and language that even their two remaining daughters could not penetrate — allowed them to survive a civil war that left them without citizenship and personal tragedies that would have shredded the wellbeing of most mortals.
  
  As to be expected, Fuller juxtaposes vignettes of the past with her current personal struggles, but in this memoir the gut-punch of her present comes near the end. I ache for this writer, this woman, and admire her enormously. She is exactly my age and has achieved success as a writer that I still fantasize about; she has worked tirelessly, through years of professional rejection and personal heartbreak, to see her work published. Her writing intoxicates, her family fascinates, and Travel Light, Move Fast does not disappoint. But it is her graceful, resigned and poignant embrace of grief that will stay with me. Highly recommended.
• 
  Diane Yannick

  At first I thought this book jumped around too much, then I started to enjoy the jumps, and by the end I was jumping for joy. Alexandra Fuller, you know how to immerse your readers in your story. By the end I felt like I knew your parents, more about Africa, and a whole lot more about what makes you tick. You added one layer at a time to create three dimensional, memorable characters. I felt so tame after looking at your parents sense of adventure. It seemed like they lived life at full tilt and seldom looked back. I was shocked though when your mum "...pulled a fetlock--strained brain more like--and had to go under the covers with the dogs." That she stayed under the covers for a full year surprised me. Your writing was simply sublime, yet never got in the way of the stories you were telling. You hand picked just the right anecdotes yet I knew that you probably had to leave some gems out in order to keep the narrative tight. Your descriptions of loss and grief were deep and touched my heart. You never lost me and when it ended, I wished for more.
  
  Here are a few quotes that I particularly liked:
  
  razor sharp daughter observations--
  
  "...my father was like a bolting horse; a terror of sinking kept him plunging forward, not so much with a sense of direction as with a sense of urgency. He avoided mire, he shook off the excess, he honed, he scraped."
  
  "But his impulsiveness refined over time toward spontaneity; his toughness resolved toward tenacity; his exuberance softened into humor."
  
  
  his unending advice--
  
  "Routine," said dad. "It's nature's antidote to disappointment."
  
  "An untended pain accumulates; pain must be tended, and for it to be tended, it must be endured."
  
  "If you stay in the misery, you'll never find the edge of it."
  
  "She (mum) gets bored if things are too easy." Hmmmmm
  
  "Careful not to walk up a hippo's arse in the dark," Dad always warned if I left.
  
  
  
• 
  Kasa Cotugno

  Ever since Alexandra Fuller attained world wide recognition with her memoir Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, she has shared her rollicking heartbreaking life in a series of memoirs. With her combination of wit and inimitable writing style, she has brought to life her early days as a farmer's daughter in war-torn central Africa followed by her adulthood and the various paths it has taken. She might have been following her mother's advice who once remarked on My Life Was a Ranch, a favorite book by a settler from the 1920's, "The way memoir should be done, in my opinion. It's filled with vivid, amusing anecdotes and interesting characters, sympathetically drawn." Here front and center are her parents, true originals themselves. Almost cinematically hilarious and rambunctious, with some questionable ideas on child rearing. It's a wonder that Fuller has almost reached the age of 50 (at times, I wondered how she even reached the age of 20).
• 
  Numidica

  First of all, my god Alexandra Fuller can write so beautifully. Second of all, how on earth was she able to write this? It is hard to imagine her loss; your heart aches for her. As the NYT reviewer said, start on page 213 to understand where she is coming from in this book. And if you have not read Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, my recommendation is to read that first.
  
  I have a slight, glancing appreciation of the community she comes from, the far flung remnants of an extinct empire. I also have a bit of understanding of her war-scarred father, because I had a war-scarred father. I understand men who never complain, who simply do whatever needs to be done next and keep moving forward. Men who would willingly take a bullet for their children or wife. But my dad was a bit more earnest than Tim Fuller, and he certainly drank less, at least by the time he became my dad. Tim Fuller was, as much as his wife, Nicola, the life of the party, while also being a very good man, and a very tough man, and a loving father and husband. He was also, in his daughter's telling, a fount of bons mots and memorable sayings.
  
  Knowing what it cost Ms. Fuller to write it, I almost feel ashamed to say this is a galloping great read, but it is, and it is the best book of hers I've read since Don't Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight. I hope that, as she says, writing about it helps her deal with loss and grief. I'm just sorry for the personal circumstances in her life that produced this book, as good as it is.
• 
  Ellis

  Along with the difficulties inherent in reading about lives based on colonialism and the white supremacy that entails, this book is rather poorly crafted, vague and repetitive and without lending much more of a sense of Tim Fuller than I got from Don't Let's Go . . . But if this is the book that Fuller needed to write after the death of her father and all that comes after it - I feel like this is a spoiler, so look away if necessary, but I was not expecting it and it shattered me - including the death of her 21-yro son, then good on her and I hope it helped. I feel like whether I enjoyed it or not is hardly the point.
• 
  Lisa of Hopewell

  My Interest
  
  I’ve enjoyed all of Fuller’s memoirs of her family’s life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi due to my own stay in Malawi and visit to Zimbabwe. Her Colonial with a capital “C” mother, her wild father, disowned by his British family, are the sort of people I tend to love–their belief in Rhodesia and all it stood for aside. She has become a “must-read” author for me.
  
  
  The Story
  
  Having had a childhood lived in unusual circumstances marks a person, but having such a childhood and having it in the middle of a war, can do real damage. Fuller’s growing up could be called Glass Castle meets Out of Africa. Part abuse, part wild ride, part fantastic adventure. In this installment of her family memoirs, she begins in Budapest with her father’s death while there on holiday. This time the author is narrating the audio version and she voices her mother EXACTLY the way I imagined her, which was very exciting for me.
  
  Having very seriously contemplated staying on in Malawi, I always find the daily life parts of her memoirs to be the best and that continued in this volume. That the author is only about 7 years younger than me makes it all the more relatable. But this time the cracks are showing. The end of Dad is too much–and for the author, there is more in store after that [no spoilers].
  
  Her eccentric parents, who “survive magnificently,” have aged and their daughters, “squaddies [i.e. G.I.s/soldiers] before they were sisters” are in their 50s and time has not helped the wounds of their childhood. The mother whose leaving the house checklist once went something like “Uzi, bullets, lipstick, sunglasses” is still her indomitable Memsiab self, surrounded by her beloved troop of dogs and cats, and after 50+ years of marriage, she and her husband still “do not bore each other” and still do not try to possess each other.
  
  I adore her parents in spite of it all, in spite of a war to keep Africans from ruling their own country. They are backbone of the Empire sorts who let nothing defeat them. These are not the stuffy folks who inhabit the Cricket and Tennis Club, or who run the local Anglican Church and hold the Gymkhanas. These are the real settlers. Give them land, sufficient booze, dogs, books, and an old Land Rover and they will survive. The booze is the key. And cigarettes. Lots and lots of cigarettes–or those “anti-mad” pills Mum gets from the Indian chemist. It IS a rough life.
  
  Her mother with her books and animals has transformed herself time and again and is now a very successful fish farmer, having educated herself for her new role. She may have lost the war, but she’s won the battle–the family survived. Her very Mitford U-ish speech adds to the whole picture of one who can “Keep Buggering On” as Churchill said, quite beautifully even in a war, even after burying three babies. In this book, even she has reached her limit. I could completely relate to her rant about being sick of people telling her she’s strong and that she’d love to just fall apart.
  
  The author’s father, who can hunt from a moving Land Rover, probably could still have played a rugby match at 70, and like any good Colonial Bwana could drink everyone under the table, could also live on beans on toast, alcohol, and tobacco. Like my own father, I’m sure Tim Fuller could have taken the Lord’s name in vain as any figure of speech. (They also saw eye-to-eye on missionaries). He could light a cigarette, fire an Uzi, and keep driving the Land Rover even with a hunting guide on the roof. That’s a manly man. He loved his wife, his family, and his life. [He also loathed “online f—ing banking” to which I say “hear, hear” especially on the passwords.]
  
  It is the sisters though who are doing the worst. Vanessa has been in a clinic in South Africa, both are divorced, Vanessa is remarried, and the author is in a new relationship. No one in the family is at all happy about the books–and, honestly? Who can blame them? While I have loved reading them, I can see it from their side: Why are you telling our secrets? Why is it all reduced to your perspective, your way of seeing it? The fissures are deep and will rend the family with Dad’s passing.
  
  My Thoughts
  
  The author, though, became whining somewhere along the way. [No spoilers but I am NOT disregarding something I cannot reveal without spoiling part of the book–ok?] The end of the book was a lot New Agey, naval gaze-y, word salad-ish moaning. [Tiny spoiler] That her new relationship wasn’t going to be the love of the ages was about as obvious as Meghan’s “love” for poor, dim Harry. That one she needed to walk it off–follow her Dad’s advice and have a party. Alcohol, her parents believe, lets one suffer successfully. She should have done that and had a splendid and necessary hangover, then reloaded and got back in the war of life.
  
  I found the end of the book [in spite of what I won’t spoil] annoying. It bordered on minor-league narcissism–“Me, me, me–my, my, my–mine, mine, mine]. A girl raised to be a stalwart Rhodesian, able to take what life sends you for Queen and Empire (well, Commonwealth) or just because you won’t take it off any bastard, shouldn’t have grown into such a whiner. It almost spoils the excellence of her writing. I’m very much like her parents when it comes to freaking out over everything. I’d have had to tell her to get over herself and carry on! I wanted to say, “Look, the did the correct first aid, loaded all the guns, loaded you into that station wagon and drove you through a war to the hospital–remember? They CARED.”
  
  The author’s falling apart and her self-absorption [part of which WAS 100% understandable — no spoilers] and the family’s dislike of her books, brings to mind Madeline L’Engle’s Crosswicks Diaries. L’Engle’s children dismissed them as “fiction.” I don’t think that is the case here, but I could see the annoyance so clearly, and equally clearly hear the author’s belief that she was right and saw things right. That was a bit hard to take.
  
  Now? Who’s for a cup of tea and who’s for a g & t? In spite of my feelings on the end, this book is a good read. Need an ashtray? Here–have a dog, or would you prefer a cat?
  My Verdict
  3.5 Stars
  
  I couldn’t give it a full 4 stars due to the whiney parts.
  
  
• 
  Kathryn in FL

  I've had to let my responses to this memoir percolate for a few days and even debated about assigning it without stars as I find rating someone else's perception about their personal life experiences somewhat inappropriate. So, consider my rating a gauge on its reading and writing style rather than a rating of Ms. Fuller's experiences.
  
  Looking back at age 50, Ms. Fuller once again, riffs on her childhood memories in light of her Father's death, which was very devastating to her. On the one hand, she seems a bit shocked as if, it was unexpected though he was in his late-70's, and yet, in light of his life habit of heavy smoking and what some have deduced as either being very possibly an alcoholic or at minimum a daily heavy drinker, this should not really have been the surprise to most, it seemed to be for her. However, she deeply loved her father and no child wants to say a final goodbye to a beloved family member. Her grief is very apparent throughout the story and we see several of the 5 stages of grieving a loss through death exhibited.
  
  Those looking to be entertained because of their prior experiences may not find anything humorous on these pages. For me, I felt this book was based on the author's personal journal with some added antidotes. It is essentially her journey through some of her grief. There was no real flow to her accounts, the chapters demonstrated limited cohesion to those preceding them or following after, rather it was disjointed much like grief can be.
  
  That said, I feel after reading her various memoirs that I "know" her life highlights. I feel like she has "mined" her life to the point of excess. As this story meanders back and forth over various events, few were particularly amusing or insightful to the reader. In essence, the book is a compilation of vignettes. It was a rather long account of experiences that highlighted her parents life choices but without any tidbits that could be applicable to the reader's life. It could be simply summarized, 'we make choices based on our hopes and perceptions and in hindsight, we failed to consider all the possible outcomes'. We also learn that the author has had a divorce that has wounded her prior to his death, though it is only mentioned in passing. What is even sadder and only briefly touched upon is the recent loss of her son, Fuller less than two years shortly thereafter. I suspect that some point, we will have the opportunity to learn of this loss and its the impact on her, in a future book perhaps.
  
  This book may be helpful for those who have struggled to grieve the loss of a close parent. Particularly one, where a child may have not fully expressed their feelings. She mentions resent-ment within the family regarding her books. Feeling that their choices is presented in an unflattering light, particularly her sister, Vanessa (who often refuses to speak with her for periods of time) and her father mentions his displeasure with her accounts either during his last days. She fails to mention her responses. It is mentioned in passing. Unfortunately, there is no sense of resolution or healing between sisters and or with her father over this contention. I think a lot of people would see such disclosure unappealing and even see their exposure as betrayal. Since Ms. Fuller doesn't demonstrate any contrition regarding her exposure of their "secrets" in print, I imagine she hasn't felt the need to do so in person. I am under the presumption that there are plenty of things she has kept from the public eye, so maybe she doesn't see a need to apologize, since much that she has shared has been witnessed by those within the communities, where her family has resided.
  
  This book didn't appeal to me for some of these reasons. However, I can see where there are many that probably would find this helpful in their own journey to mourn a beloved parent. I get the sense that she is haunted by the poverty that often plagued them during her childhood, as they moved about due to circumstances and political unrest in Zambia and Rhodesia (when it was still Rhodesia). As well as the loss of three siblings that left vacancies in the hearts of her parents and all the sister's lives. Then to suddenly loose a son, just starting in life (he was 20, I believe). Is certainly going to be soul crushing. I hurt with her having experienced this loss myself and no parent expects to have a child precede them.
  
  What I conclude is that she has not experienced much healing and thus she has little hope to pass along to others...Her raw pain is evident. I wish her peace and resolution for all her losses.
• 
  Jillian Doherty

  Potentially best and most defining book yet - grief, humor with extraordinary storytelling. You can feel how this helped her get through through wide and deafening loss - and how the cathartic writing process illustrates a story only she could deliver.
  
  By recalling his strength and wisdom, along with the coping over the staggering hardship of losing her father so close to losing her son as well, she methodically wrote to find closure.
  Reflecting on his incredible life experiences was healing, redemptive and is vibrantly reflective in her writing.
  
  Bo, as Alexandra's known to her family, understand how she needed to embody her father's story, the ones she misses the most. He preferred chaos to predictability, he longed for promise than wallow in regret, and more was far more afraid of becoming board then getting lost in life. She writes about the joy to feel his life force again, and how his last words were saying how he was a very lucky man!
  
  Galley borrowed from the publisher.
• 
  L

  Fascinating and Terribly sad. Such a struggle of a life. I hope she finds peace some day.
• 
  Sara

  That which I perceived as the family’s wackiness in Fuller’s other memoirs just goes absolutely over the top here and I loathed them. I didn’t see much heroic about her head-in-the-sand father. And the neglectful, alcoholic, narcissistic mother Nicola needs a good slap and a few months at an African Hazelden. Her sister Vanessa at The Rock needs to get the hell over herself.
  
  Just...icky. Beautifully written, as always, but we are deep (No. Seriously. Hear me: DEEP) into “Glass Castle” territory here. If stories of pervasive parental incompetence/neglect push your buttons, give this a miss.
  
  I wish I had.
  
  ———————
  Part of me wonders if Fuller is clearing her throat here. All this about her dad (again) to tell us — ever so briefly — about her son in the last 20 pages: “But what I REALLY ned to say is...”
  
  There’s got to be another book coming about her inner landscape as she works through THAT death, doesn’t there? (And her brief, clearly grief-driven stint with that dude in the yurt.)
  
  Joan Didion touches only lightly on Quintana Roo’s death in “The Year of Magical Thinking” because she is there processing the grief over her husband’s death first. Then comes “Blue Nights” and you’re absolutely hit between the eyes again.
  
  There’s more here to be written here, but maybe we’re done with the Tim/Nicola era.
• 
  Bayneeta

  Have read and enjoyed previous memoirs from this author, and this new one did not disappoint. This one begins with the hospitalization of her father in Hungary where her parents had been vacationing. Fuller writes beautifully, is a natural storyteller, and was blessed with family and experiences worth telling.
• 
  Patricia

  I’m in it for the long haul with Fuller. This is the first book I’ve read of hers and I’m sucked into her world and I want more. Her parents are forces of nature and I aspire to that realm. I’m taking notes. ;) Pretty sure I had a dream with Tim and Harry the other night.
• 
  Shelley

  Though Alexandra Fuller has achieved the rare "I will read anything she publishes no matter what it is" status in my mind, I confess that I was a little skeptical about whether she could squeeze yet another memoir out of her parents' life story. This one centers on the death of her father and the aftermath of grief. Like everything she writes, it's beautiful and funny, but, unlike her other memoirs, it lacks a strong narrative arc. It reads more like a collection of essays on the nature of things, inspired by her father's favorite aphorisms. It's still a good read, and there is a revelation toward the end of the book that I didn't see coming and that totally broke my heart.
• 
  Jamie

  This book is advertised as Ms. Fuller’s book about her father but it is so much more. It is about family and their suffering and their joys. At times I laughed out loud and at other times I gasped. Highly recommended. One of the best of the year for me. I listened on Audible which was an added treat as Ms. Fuller read it.
• 
  Deb Holden

  My first time reading this author who writes of her childhood in Africa. This book was centered on the death of her father. The writing is beautiful. It takes a bit to get into it but worth the read. The ending is quite shocking.
• 
  PJ

  I love Alexandra Fuller and her books more than I can say. I am sad when I finish reading them because I can’t ever read them for the first time again (though I will read them all over and over again).
• 
  Bekah Craig

  I absolutely devoured this memoir. Fuller writes about her parents with such humor and reverence. This memoir deals specifically with the aftermath of her father's unexpected death so some of the content is somber and weighty. Even so, I laughed far more than I cried reading this. Her parents are both wildly bohemian and quintessentially British which made for a hilarious and interesting juxtaposition.
• 
  Jennie Rosenblum

  If it were not my book club's pick for this month I probably would not have finished it. A lot of whining and moaning about a difficult childhood and a lot of grief to be dealt with by the author. Not a good time in my life for this read.
• 
  Katie

  If Alexandra Fuller writes a shopping list, read it; margin notes in her high school biology text, read them; weekly menu plans with beans and franks every Tuesday, read those, too.  Anything you can get your hands on.  Ms. Fuller will always have something original to say – even about the beans and franks.  But, of course, if you are familiar with her brilliant memoirs, you know she is from highly original stock, the peripatetic Fuller family of here and there, Africa, and in her work, she returns to her family again and again without ever losing an iota of freshness or impact.
  
  Of the five children born to Tom and Nicola Fuller, Alexandra and her sister Vanessa are the only two who survived to adulthood - a family of survivors, actually:  tough, hard-working and hard-drinking, creative, intelligent as all get-out, eccentric, frivolous, flawed, forever bereaved, and determined to cope.  And if coping doesn’t work, then cope harder.  At times, over the years, the Fullers were even without a “fixed abode”, but they always managed to rebound, eventually settling on a farm in Zambia raising bananas and fish.
  
  In Travel Light, Move Fast, advice from Tom Fuller appears as chapter headings, and, perhaps, this optimistic dreamer is best summed up in the first one:  “In the Unlikely Event of Money, Buy Two Tickets to Paris”.  Never one to let insecurity get in his way, he would have done just that in such an unlikely event.  In fact, he and his beloved Nicola are on vacation in Budapest when he falls seriously ill and is hospitalized.  Alexandra, now living in Wyoming, flies to Budapest to be with her parents and returns with her mother and her father’s ashes to the farm in Zambia and to a family in the aftermath of another death.  Determined.  Shattered.  Forever bereaved.
  
  As for me, well, I am both besotted with and puzzled by the Fullers.  I have been ever since Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight:  An African Childhood, and I return to them every time the talented Alexandra offers a new opportunity.  If you know Ms. Fuller’s good work, you will be saddened beyond measure by Travel Light, Move Fast.  If you’re new to her books, this latest can be read as a stand-alone, but I’m going to be honest with you, Readers.  While I’m usually not much troubled by jumping in and out of sequence, I’m not sure this book is the best place to make your first acquaintance with this writer and her family.  You see, it is a book of endings.  Personally I’m glad I began at the beginning, but the choice is yours, of course.  The very best advice I can give you is quite simple, really.  Read Ms. Fuller’ books.  All of them.
  
  Full Disclosure:  A review copy of this book was provided to me by Penguin Press via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.  I would like to thank the publisher, the author and Edelweiss for providing me this opportunity.  All opinions expressed herein are my own.
• 
  Ashley

  **On the 2023 Re-Read**
  
  My first read was in the months following my mother's death. As with Joan Didion's surpassingly fine The Year of Magical Thinking this book was a salve and a good companion, though a jauntier one than Didion's. I would submit that we have few writers left whom I trust as much as Alexandra Fuller. Writing is a kind of priesthood; she takes it with the requisite seriousness.
  
  It's hard to imagine exactly where she will go from here. There is just so much pain described in this thin work. It begins as a tribute to her father, after his death. For 9/10 of the book it is a beautiful, moving, fitting tribute to him, his life in its moral complexity, and her love for him. This was the book she had in mind when she set out writing one day.
  
  The last pages are an almost unbearable coda describing the disintegration of her relationship--and the unexpected death of her 20 year old son. It is shocking to read. Above her desk, Fuller used to keep a little card on which was written "You can write your way out of this". Though I don't think she believes this anymore, I hope she keeps trying.
• 
  Nancy

  Alexandra Fuller is one of my favorite writers today. Her previous books (among them Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Scribbling the Cat, and Cocktails Under the Tree of Forgetfulness) mostly mine her life and the lives of her family while growing up in what was Rhodesia during their civil war. Her stories are so incredibly honest, quite poignant, and often give me a good belly laugh. Think of her as a cross between Jeanette Walls (Glass Castle) and David Sedaris (Dress your Family in Courderoy) whose childhood geography is so wholly unfamiliar to the average western reader as to be astonishing.
  In this book, the impending death of her father and then his actual death, send Fuller back again to her childhood, this time from the perspective of her love for her Dad,Tim Fuller. It is a beautiful ode to her Dad (who was definitely an "original") as well as a bittersweet story about what happens to families after the death of a larger than life patriarch. There is so much gold buried in this book. I highly recommend it (esp. for fans of "memoir")
• 
  ~Annaki~

  This is one of those books that are so very hard to rate, because how do you rate someone elses experience of profound loss, grief and heartache? How do you rate another persons true account of events in their life?
  As always, the author has brillant observations about life, death, family and self. And that awesome on point humor.
  I was heartbroken reading this, but having read all of the authors other books, I felt it was a disappointing read. Jumbled and disjointed, a lot of longwinded/rephrased repetition, from this as well as previous books and over the top descriptions that felt almost like caricatures.
  
  Regardless, Fuller is still one of my favorite authors of all time and I really hope she finds happiness and peace, I wish her all the best.
• 
  Kathy

  This is the second book I have read by Fuller, both of them memoirs. I really enjoy her writing style, which is meandering, funny, insightful and captivating.
  
  It’s not so much the arc of the story as the terrific, honest and witty writing that captivates me. Also, her childhood growing up in Africa is so uncommon and fascinating in itself, besides having the larger-than-life personalities of her parents thrown it.
  
  This book is about the death of her father, and how she deals with loss and grief. It’s not a sad book, until you get to the very end - which is just heartbreaking. A worthwhile journey to take with Fuller, one that I will take again sometime in the future. This book is worth re-reading.
  
  
  
• 
  Carolina

  
  I've read several of Alexander Fuller's various autobiographical accounts of different period of her life and very much enjoyed them. Unfortunately in this audio book which mostly deals with her father and mother after his passing in a Budapest hospital, the imitation she does of their voices just becomes unbearable after a while. I wish she wouldn't have felt the need to make their accents so stuffy and pronounced. There are a lot of details about their lives, their idiosyncrasies, etc. but not that much about her deep, personal grief.... at least not as far as I got into the book.