Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (2002), a ferociously unsentimental account of her childhood as the offspring of white settlers in 1970s Rhodesia, was followed in 2011 by Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, her equally candid memoir about her hard-drinking, dysfunctional parents (Fuller’s mother memorably features in the first book as the “Leaning Tower of Pissed”). Dogs ends with a glimpse of Fuller, aged 22 – the bruised survivor of a quixotic family and a terrifying civil war – on the day of her wedding to an American called Charlie Ross. The bride is feverish with malaria. The bride’s mother leads the wedding party around the farm on extended drunken picnics. The bride’s father ends the day by setting himself on fire, and is extinguished with a bottle of champagne by an alarmed guest. “I couldn’t,” Fuller concludes, “be more thoroughly married.”

Sadly, it turns out that this was wishful thinking. Leaving Before the Rains Come picks up where Dogs left off, following Fuller and her unsuspecting new husband into a rocky 20-year union and out the other side. The savage wit that gave her earlier memoirs their bite slices through the conventional pieties of family relationships here, too. Declaring that she isn’t impressed by her parents’ “suicide mission of a deliberately disordered life”, Fuller chooses Charlie – a seemingly unflappable safari tour operator and white-water rafter – because he is “someone who wasn’t a stranger to adventure, but yet who was not unpredictably, superfluously dangerous”. Her hope is that she and Charlie will find safety in each other, but in spite of their sincerity and idealism, the problems of culture and belonging that they face prove insurmountable.

The two rent a charmless house outside Lusaka in Zambia, where Charlie tries to build up his safari business, and Fuller, feeling under pressure to play the capable white homesteader, discovers that she is unable to manage her household at all. These scenes are bleakly comic. There is a hostile cook “with the creeping aspect of a spy” who scrubs the floors outside their bedroom at midnight; a stoned gardener who appropriates the vegetable patch to grow his marijuana crop; a bored groom to whom Fuller gives “death-defying” driving lessons. “I could not prevent the staff from fighting with each other and brazenly stealing from us, and then spreading blame all around,” she confesses. “I had no control over when anyone came to work, or when, if ever, they left.”

Fuller’s recollection of this domestic shambles is saved from condescension by her own chastening sense of inadequacy, and her awareness that, much as she loves Africa, her claim to belong to it can only ever be provisional. But if she is not African, then what is she? During an outbreak of cholera she pays compulsive visits to a makeshift downtown clinic, appalled by the “invisible membrane” between its “dank, dying world” and the sterile bunker she inhabits with Charlie. Even more disturbing is her awareness that the suffering on display in the slum hospital resonates with her in a way that living with her orderly, temperate husband does not. The truth, as Fuller acknowledges, is that her tumultuous childhood has left her with an affinity for mayhem and trauma. Yet the differences between husband and wife, despite their both being of European descent, are also partly anthropological:

[Charlie] viewed me as a wild version of himself, a westerner in the raw. But now that he had married me, and I was out of my natural habitat, my plumage was less shiny, my skills less useful, my constant noise less charming. Instead of looking like a survivor of a tough and wondrous life, I looked like a damaged survivor of sordid, violent and undisciplined excess.

Fuller’s caustic probing of the meaning of culture – and the micro-culture of the family – is one of the book’s great strengths. “In the west,” she comments wryly, “it was believed that attitude and ambition saved you. In Africa, we had learned that no one was immune to capricious tragedy” – and soon her fatalism and pervasive sense of dread are brought into a head-on collision with American values. After Fuller nearly dies from malaria following the birth of their first child, she and Charlie relocate to his native Wyoming:

It had been decided then: our marriage wasn’t going to be about nearly dying, and violent beauty, and unpredictability. Our union was going to be about sticking it out, sensible decisions, college funds, mortgages, and car payments. Maybe it wouldn’t have the seductive edges of terror and madness. But we would have medical insurance and a retirement plan.

Yet the United States proves to be as much a puzzle as a relief to Fuller. From its magnifying distance, her family begins to seem “even more careless, unbalanced and mad than they had when we’d all been in Africa. Meanwhile, close up, Charlie’s family looked saner than I had believed it possible any family could be.” On first meeting Charlie and hearing that his relatives were “Main Line” Philadelphians, she liked to think that this suggested something racy and illicit; she is disappointed that they prove “not to be heroin addicts at all”, but of unimpeachably stodgy settler stock. Compared to the Africans Fuller grew up with, the Americans she encounters are emotional conservatives, spending their feelings frugally. And they spend time frugally. “In Africa,” she notes, “we filled up all available time busily doing not much, and then we wasted the rest.” But here “there seemed to be so little of it, and its unaccustomed short supply panicked me in grocery checkout lines, during meals, and at traffic lights … Of course, I changed and sped up.” The result of living in America is an uneasy erosion of Fuller’s sense of self. To her dismay, she realises that identity is easily corruptible: “Retaining culture takes effort and persistence and discipline. It’s a commitment, not a flag. You can’t just pull it out and wave it about when it’s convenient.”

These reflections on time and change segue into a heart-wrenching dissection of the end of love and the death of a marriage. In the light of Fuller’s remarks about cultural differences, it becomes clear that the failure of her union with Charlie is really a failure to establish a distinct culture of their own. As they fight over the purpose of their existence together, about how best to arrange the 24 hours of their day, their supposedly “safe, sane American lives” rapidly become as fraught as their earlier “crazy, diseased African ones”. Theirs is, as Fuller admits, not a unique story – their mistake is to think that they alone can tackle marriage as a fresh pact, “distinct and separate from all the ways my grandmothers and great-grandmothers had done marriage … across seas, between cultures, and against all the odds” – but it is given depth by her consciousness of the bigger picture.

Perhaps the most painful irony of all is that Fuller’s drive to write, and her unnervingly honest voice, both come from this very sense of displacement. As the marriage falters, the books, with their acid humour, start to arrive. “Why don’t you laugh at my jokes?” she asks her husband. “Because your jokes aren’t funny,” he replies. “They’re unkind.” But in spite of her tough truth-telling, Fuller’s perceptions are anything but unkind. Her position on the margins makes her unusually sensitive to vulnerability of any sort. She is especially good at rendering the terrible physical and emotional fragility of children. Of her baby daughter, she remembers, with agonised tenderness, that “her white terrycloth diapers hung on a washing line above our heads in the sitting room and kitchen, like strings of white flags requesting ceasefire or signalling surrender”. In the same way, her description of the infant corpses in the Lusaka cholera clinic breathes compassion without sacrificing a writer’s grasp of our human need to bear witness: “Some of the bodies were so tiny they looked like punctuation marks, damp little commas, a brief pause between life and death.” She is as unsparing of herself, skewering her own bewilderment and longing for love with a gallant belief in the primacy of truth, in the importance, in memoir, of telling things “the way they are”. On the evidence of this urgent, eloquently fearless book, she is right.

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