Carla Jean Whitley

Alexandra Fuller writes to untangle a knot—usually a knot in her own lived experience. 

“Everyone in my family hates the books I write, they ask me to stop, but I can’t look away. ‘Write novels,’ Dad begged, but real life never stops coming at me, and it pours from my pen more easily than fiction,” she writes. “It’s not only the old adage to write what I know, but also to write what I love. And it’s the artist’s impulse to turn again and again to the same subject until the subject gives up its secrets.”

That’s how the bestselling author of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight explains why she repeatedly returns to her youth spent in central and southern Africa and her ongoing family ties to the land.

In Travel Light, Move Fast, Fuller focuses her gaze on her father, Tim. She and her mother are by Tim’s side for his sudden demise in a Hungarian hospital. After his death, the pair returns with Tim’s ashes to the Fuller family farm in Africa, where Fuller attempts to help her mom resettle after losing her chaotic, iconic partner of half a century.

Tim Fuller was British, and his family lamented his move to Africa. “Tim Fuller went to Africa and lost everything,” or so went his family lore. But Tim found the life he desired: a woman who would tolerate and even celebrate his flamboyant ways, freedom to travel the land, a family and eventually—at his wife’s urging—a farm of his own.

Fuller carefully picks away at the tangle of her grief by exploring her dad’s life, gliding between her own experience in the present and his raucous past. Travel Light, Move Fast is a sensitive, meticulously wrought portrait of one family’s sometimes-challenging dynamics, set against an unforgiving African backdrop. Fuller’s beautiful prose juxtaposes the grieving process with the lessons she learned from the man whose adventures shaped her.

“Human beings are storytelling creatures, craning to see the crumpled metal in the closed-off highway lane, working from the moment the traffic slows to construct a narrative from what’s left behind. But our tales, even the most tragic ones, hinge on specificity. The story of one drowned Syrian boy washed up in the surf keeps us awake at night with grief. The story of four million refugees streaming out of Syria seems more like a math problem.”

Margaret Renkl nestles that observation into “The Unpeaceable Kingdom,” an essay midway through Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss. But it could serve as a thesis for her collection. 

Late Migrations is a collection of essays, some as short as a paragraph, that reconcile Renkl’s lived experience with the natural world around her. She resides in suburban Nashville, not a wilderness, and works at a desk, not in the outdoors. Even so, Renkl is so in touch with the birds and butterflies of her yard that one could mistake her for a trained naturalist. Indeed, she is known as a nature writer; as a New York Times contributing op-ed writer, she writes about flora and fauna, as well as the American South’s politics and culture. 

The essays that compose Late Migrations stand on their own, offering glimpses into loss and living as they toggle between Renkl’s past and present across the Southern U.S. Taken together, though, they create a narrative that depicts not only the migrations of winged creatures but also the lives of Renkl’s family. (Appropriately, Renkl’s reflections are punctuated with illustrations by her brother, Billy Renkl. The images are as captivating as the author’s contemplative yet powerful words.) 

As Renkl observes the lives around her, she notes that a “life cycle” could just as accurately be dubbed a “death cycle.” But the term we use is more reflective of the human approach to life, as evident throughout Renkl’s quiet, lovely observations.

She writes, “Human beings are creatures made for joy. Against all evidence, we tell ourselves that grief and loneliness and despair are tragedies, unwelcome variations from the pleasure and calm and safety that in the right way of the world would form the firm ground of our being.”

A parentless child is an orphan. A spouse whose partner dies is a widow. But what, muses Jayson Greene, do you call a parent whose child has died? “It seems telling to me there is no word in our language for our situation,” he writes. “It is unspeakable, and by extension, we are not supposed to exist.”

Greene and his wife, Stacy, find themselves in this nameless state after their only child, Greta, dies at age 2. Greta was sitting on a bench with her grandmother when a brick fell from a nearby windowsill and struck her on the head. 

The couple quickly turn to one another for comfort; while some families are torn apart by such a tragedy, the Greenes find hope in working through their grief together. But grief is a tremendous thing, and mourning Greta is a gargantuan task.

Jayson and Stacy open themselves to healing possibilities outside of their norm. They didn’t think of themselves as the sort of people who would turn to a medium in times of grief, but she becomes part of their journey when the couple travels to the Kripalu Institute for a seminar called “From Grieving to Believing.” A grief expert at this retreat tells them, “Grief is a reflection of a connection that has been lost. . . . It is a reflection of that love you had for that individual.”

The Greenes find comfort in these words, and in the family and friends who rally around them. Even as they move forward—sometimes literally, like when they sell their home—the Greenes carry Greta’s memory and their pain.

“The act of grieving our daughter continues on, and on, and on,” Greene writes. “We have held our firstborn child’s corpse in our arms, and now there is no limit to what we can endure.”

Once More We Saw Stars isn’t about the tragedy that befell a family—although Greene recounts with exquisite detail how he felt in the tragic days that ended his daughter’s life. The memoir is instead a story of a couple who faced one of the worst things imaginable and still continued to choose life.