Audiobook9 hours
Leaving Before the Rains Come
Written by Alexandra Fuller
Narrated by Alexandra Fuller
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this audiobook
As her marriage collapses, the author of the international bestseller Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight relearns the fearless ways of her father to find her own true north. Standing in the wreckage of her marriage, in her adopted country America, Alexandra Fuller revisits the continent she loves and finds in her father's harsh, simple and uncompromising ways the key to her salvation. Casting a fresh eye on her parent's boisterous strengths and debilitating weaknesses, painting a vivid picture of America at the end of decades of false certainty and security, and revealing her Africa, vital and resilient, Leave Before the Rains Come is an astonishment - a memoir of such grace and intelligence, wit and courage that only Alexandra Fuller could have written it.
Author
Alexandra Fuller
Alexandra Fuller was born in England in 1969. In 1972, she moved with her family to a farm in southern Africa. She lived in Africa until her midtwenties. In 1994, she moved to Wyoming. She is the author of several memoirs, including Leaving Before the Rains Come, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, and Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
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Reviews for Leaving Before the Rains Come
Rating: 3.7628865979381443 out of 5 stars
4/5
97 ratings12 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5If you read Fuller’s autobiography Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: an African Childhood you’ll want to read this follow-up book. Here she explores the disintegration of her marriage and how her independent childhood in Africa shaped her and helped lead to the dissolution. As always her writing is compelling and thought- provoking.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Alexander Fuller writes in a voice different from most writers about a world very different from a typical US setting and was worth reading for those reasons alone.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a fabulous continuation of Bobo Fuller's memoirs, and she maintains her funny, heartbreaking, no-nonsense voice. I don't know why she lets us in (well, she says it's for the money), but I'm incredibly inspired by her willingness to do so, and by her unflinching narration and her thoughtful perspectives.
Not least, and this is a sort of petty thing, but as a single woman I really appreciate a memoir that does not end all wrapped up in a wedding bow. She had a love story, a family. She has a painful divorce and a massive identity shift and she just tells that story. She leaves it where she is, she doesn't get rescued by a new relationship, she doesn't suddenly have an epiphany that leads to wealth or travel. It's not easy on her or her husband or her kids, but they survive it, and that's what I, as a reader and another real person need to see -- the crap comes and you survive it. Your heart breaks and you survive it.
I hope that there are more stories in the future, because I love spending reading time with her. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I've read all of Alexandra Fuller's autobiographies/memoirs. This latest installment is more thoughtful and contemplative as she explores her relationship with her soon-to-be ex-husband. As always, her writing is honest and thought provoking. I do think, however, that readers will not enjoy this book as much as possible if they haven't read Ms. Fuller's earlier works, especially Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Another installment of Fuller's memoirs and I have loved all of them. She is a beautiful writer and her life story is incredible. I listened to this book and she is the reader - I could listen to her voice all day long! Highly recommend!!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I never get tired of reading Fuller.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5She is such a good writer. This book had less a sense of place, and seemed a little less accessible than either of her first two books, but it was still powerful. In the end, though, I'm not sure I really understand what the problem was with her marriage, and maybe she's not either (or maybe she just couldn't write as openly about it as she did her family in her earlier books). Also would have liked to learn more about her children, who seemed quite distant figures.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5To paraphrase Tolstoy, all happy marriages are alike, but all unhappy ones are unhappy in their own special way. In Alexandra Fuller's new memoir, she writes about the coming apart of her marriage of 20+ years with a lot of looking back at her life in Africa and the marriage of her parents which has seemed to endure despite countless hardships.I love Fuller's first two books - Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and Cocktails Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, but this volume seems altogether too self-indulgent.She marries her husband because he will "keep her safe" and protect her from the dangerous chaos of Southern Africa but then becomes disenchanted when he turns out to be just a successful American. Paging Dr. Freud: we get that you wanted a more stable version of your father, but it doesn't warrant 258 pages of naval gazing. She never seems to realize that the secret to her parents' long marriage is that they didn't think about it too much.Ms. Fuller is now living in a yurt in Wyoming with a 49-year-old artist. “I feel like I’ve been in a white-water river for 45 years,” she said recently. “Now I’m just lying around the yurt. I couldn’t have been more in need of a place to rest.” Let's hope after she has rested she'll find something new & better to write about.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I much preferred her first book. Alexandra is not South African but she has a strong sense of Africa. I prefer the focus on Africa because I can identify and understand this - she really gives a good sense of central Africa. Less interested in a marriage that does not work. Also her family did not live in Africa for very long and seemed somewhat identified with England.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5"For the first time, I was beginning to see that for a woman to speak her mind in any clear, unassailable, unapologetic way, she must first possess it."I am giving this book 4.25 stars with the caveat that in order to fully appreciate it, one should read her preceding two memoirs first. Fuller tends to tell her stories in a non-linear fashion, weaving in and out of past and present, detouring from the relevant to the immaterial. And she likes to refer to previous events that helped to shape the woman that she is today. In order to follow her brilliant writing and her difficult journey, it is best to have started at the beginning with her. I love how she writes and how she thinks about things. This book focuses on the disintegration of her marriage, but it is about so much more than that. It is about finding your own voice. About deciding for yourself what your journey will encompass."For a while, in that same Peugeot, it was possible to watch the road whip by as we drove, dust billowing up into the backseat in a reddish film until Mum put bits of cardboard down where the floorboards had rusted through. She painted sunsets, giraffes, and flowers on the cardboard, and signed her name in the corners with a flourish, 'Like the Sistine Chapel, only not on the ceiling,' she said. 'Although I wouldn't stand on it if I were you, or you'll plop right out.' Which served to prove to me from an early age that imminent danger and innovative beauty were often closely linked."
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book had a lot of structural problems, I think. I enjoyed the bits with her eccentric African family, a vein that Fuller has mined before to great effect. The dissolution of her marriage was messy, and difficult to understand, told backward and forward in time. However, Fuller can write like nobody's business, so I enjoyed this book which I received as an early release ebook from First to Read.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Leaving Before the Rains Come is the memoir of a South African woman that marries an American man after seeing in him a secure and sensible future. From her recollections she contemplates the fact that her exotic nature and how she was raised resulted in a negative impact to their marriage over time. While most of her reasons for the end of their marriage were relatable (the monotony of day-to-day life and ever-expanding debt) there wasn't anything fresh or enlightening about it to keep it from being anything but insipid. Her details of life in Africa were informative and heavily descriptive but lacked sufficient explanation making it difficult to comprehend as an outsider completely unaware of African life. Leaving Before the Rains Come is an accessible story yet suffers by being listless and meandering, lacking any concise point.I received this book free from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.