You can take the girl out of Africa…

I actually finished the third of Alexandra Fuller’s memoirs, Leaving Before the Rains Come, right after the other two. But while I loved the other two and couldn’t wait to write them up, I felt a lot more “meh” about this one, so I’m just now getting around to it…

“You always think there will be more time and then suddenly there isn’t. You know how it is. You have to leave before the rains come, or it’s too late.”

This third memoir focusing primarily on Alexandra’s marriage, and subsequent divorce. She basically marries her husband for what he represents: safety and stability in Alexandra’s otherwise very unstable world (her parents’ constant moves, their poverty, her mother’s mental illness, the war raging around them). While he seems like a nice enough guy, Alexandra soon finds out that that’s not really the best basis for a marriage. They soldier on, however, and move to the United States. Here, Alexandra writes rejected novel after rejected novel, while traveling the country to talk about Africa — a place that she begins to lose touch with over time.

This book suffers from a lack of two things: Nicola Fuller (Alexandra’s manic depressive mother, who light up the first two books with her words and actions), and the continent of Africa. Alexandra’s marriage seems to suffer from a lack of the family and place where she grew up, and a similar loss is felt in the writing. It’s not a bad book, and some parts (mostly discussing the fallout of her divorce) hit hard, but it’s hard to real 300 pages about an unhappy person. And it’s nothing like the first two memoirs that I enjoyed so much.