Monday, September 24, 2012

October Not Fiction Book Discussions

Fans of memoirs about unusual childhoods may have read Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller, published in 2001. In it, Fuller shares her experiences of growing up in Africa in the 1970s and 80s, at the end of colonialism, as the child of staunchly colonialist parents. She describes the harsh but starkly beautiful landscape, the dangers of the constant civil wars, and her family's many adventures and losses with wry humor and honesty. Her mother, Nicola Fuller, deemed it an Awful Book for its unflattering portrayal of her. This month, we will read her mother's story in Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness.

Fuller tells her mother's story from a greater distance from her own childhood and as the mother of children herself, bringing empathy to her sharp eye for detail and character. In an interview with CBS News, Fuller said, "Inspiration crept up on me in surges and waves and finally on a crest of illness. To begin with, mum was furious about the first memoir I had written, Don't Let's Go To the Dogs Tonight (a work about my childhood that she calls 'the Awful Book'). She said I had not seen her as she saw herself at all and that I had missed the 'point' of her, so as part of an effort to reconcile, I asked to interview her at length. To my great surprise, she agreed. So we met in Scotland at her sister's house and talked for hours with a tape recorder in front of us. It turned out that her childhood, her sense of herself and her heritage, were so rich (she is such a vivid storyteller) that I started to make pilgrimages into her geography to better understand her past--the Isle of Skye and Kenya. That initial interview and the travel that resulted from it led to more questions and interviews over several years. Still, I wasn't sure I had the material for a book until a couple of years ago when I found myself sick in bed with whooping cough for 100 days. Too ill to wade through my pile of magazines and periodicals, and too depressed to listen to the radio, I dug out my tapes and notes from all those trips and conversations and lay in a dark room listening to mum's voice. The experience lifted me out of my mildly fevered state and directly into her world. I was mesmerized by her story and started to write the book right then, propped up in bed. In retrospect, I think a temperature of about 101 was just about the perfect level of remove I needed from my own world to begin to really hear mum. The quality of my listening shifted from judgment to compassion."

This memoir poses so many interesting questions: How do we see ourselves? How do others see us? How does our understanding of ourselves and others change over time and distance? Can we really know ourselves and others? In our discussions, we can consider why Alexandra Fuller felt the need to tell her mother's story, in which she repeats some of the anecdotes she told in Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, as well as her attitude toward her mother. Fuller says, "But in the glow of love, in the heat of battle, in the cushioned denial of the present, how few have the wisdom to look forward with unclouded hindsight.  Not my parents, certainly.  Not most of us." And this is why we read about the lives of others--in order to learn how to live.

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, October 2, at 6:30 p.m. at the Main Library; Thursday, October 18, at 11:00 a.m. at the West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.