Memoir

We are in the midst of our memoir study and have read many memoir excerpts in class and during independent reading.  Now you can share your thoughts and recommendations with us all about your memoir selections.


Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller  


"to the dogs," has meant to destruction and ruin. Something can "go to the dogs," meaning that it becomes less and less desirable.  If someone says of someone else that he's "going to the dogs," it may mean that he has let himself go, that he no longer looks after himself properly, doesn't eat well,  or doesn't groom himself well.

This is the memoir of Alexandra Fuller, a white girl growing up in Africa amidst the country's struggle for independence and her family's struggle for survival. It is a delicate weaving of the civil unrest, not just in Rodesia, Malawi,and Zambia, but in her home. 

The lush words and vivid descriptions illuminate her  unbreakable bond with a continent and the people who inhabit it.

The book is told chronologically through a child's perspective using photos at the start of each chapter that seem to serve as an anchor for her memory.

She comes to realize that  much of the family’s interior lives is an expression of their exterior situation, and that her mother’s psychological condition is an internalization of some

instability or madness in the family’s social  and personal circumstances.

I count this as not only one of my favorite memoirs, but one of my all time favorite books. I fell in love with the  big spinning out of control stories and the smaller heartbreaking ones. I relished  her description of  the sights, smells and sounds of a country and continent going through turmoil.

Lines We Love:


 ""What I know about Africa as a child (because I have no memory of any other place) is her smell: hot, sweet, smoky, salty, sharp-soft. It is like black tea, cut tobacco, fresh fire, old sweat, young grass.....The other thing I can't know about Africa until after I have left (and heard the sound of other, colder, quieter, more insulated places) is her noise." pg. 130