cornia1

I finished reading this several days ago, but as I was down and out with the flu, I didn't have the energy to write the review that I feel this book deserves. I'm happy to now be both on the mend from the flu and ready to talk about just how much I loved this book. This is really what I expected Fuller's first memoir, "Don't Let's Go To the Dogs Tonight," would be like. As you can read from my review of that book, however, it came across both that this was definitely the first work of a young writer, and that she had done very little in terms of challenging her assumptions about the rarefied world in which she was raised as part of a white British family in Africa. In this memoir, written about a decade after the first, Fuller does the work that was missing from the first. Her level of self-awareness and reflection is amazing here, particular in dealing with the issue of her mother and how the elder Fuller viewed her own portrayal in that other "Awful Book," as she called it. What's more, this book was funny. All in all, this is the book I wish Fuller had written on the first go-around--with the complete knowledge that she most likely could not have written this book without having gone through the experience of the "Awful Book" first.

2022-10-14 17:19