‘Double ouzo, hold the Coke,’ Mum ordered at the Mkushi Country Club bar, during spanikopita night. ‘My daughter’s a lesbian.’ The Greek farmers blinked at her uncomprehendingly. ‘Oh, don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. You bloody people invented it.’
Alexandra Fuller’s wild parents make good copy, as was clear in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, her bestselling 2002 memoir about her chaotic, often tragic, childhood in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia).
In this new book, purportedly about her divorce after a 20 year marriage to a ‘calm’ American she thought would be her protector — ‘plus, I was so in love’ — Fuller’s parents again, almost by default, take centre stage. From her new, more ordered life in Wyoming, where she and her husband Charlie Ross went after the birth of their first child, she sent her parents a case of the American insect repellent Off!, hoping to reduce ‘the incidence of familial malaria’.
‘Bobo sent us gallons of Bugger Off for Christmas,’ Dad told anyone who showed up. ‘Go ahead, squirt yourself… Shower in it. Have a bath.’
Fuller’s foray into sapphism, she explains, had occurred because male suitors couldn’t run the gauntlet of her hard-drinking, wilful parents. But Charlie, undaunted, took her canoeing on the Zambezi.
‘One tent?’ I clarified. ‘Just us?’ I took a deep breath. ‘You should know my dad will wave a shotgun at you.’
Charlie didn’t flinch. ‘That’s okay. I’ve spent every summer of my life on my grandmother’s ranch in Wyoming and she waves her shotgun at everyone, especially after cocktail hour.’
She married him at 23, in a state of emotional and physical exhaustion after her parents had lost ‘three children, a war, a few farms and for a while my mother had seriously lost her mind’.
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