Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller

There is always a special risk, says Alexandra Fuller, when putting real-life people into books. Not all those who recognised themselves in her terrific memoir of 1960s and 1970s white-ruled Africa, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, had appreciated their transformation. The author’s own mother, Nicola Fuller, was disquieted to find herself as a character in that ‘awful book’ (as she refers to it today). Was she really that flaky and drunk? Or was that how others perceived her? Most writers make life more interesting than it is; I suspect that Alexandra Fuller is among them.

In Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness she returns to the Africa of her childhood and to her eccentric farmer family. Her mother, now self-styled ‘Nicola Fuller of Central Africa’, takes centre stage. For all her earlier objections, indeed, the book is effectively her biography. Flattered to be the subject of a memoir, she sees in her note-taking daughter a potential Boswell.