Mum's the star in Fuller's 'Cocktail Hour'

COCKTAIL HOUR UNDER THE TREE OF FORGETFULNESS, by Alexandra Fuller. Penguin Press, 238 pp., $25.95.

If you want a leg up as a memoirist, it sure doesn't hurt to have a flamboyant, larger-than-life mother. Just ask Mary Karr ("The Liar's Club") or Augusten Burroughs ("Running With Scissors"), to name two writers who penned indelible portraits of Mom in their bestselling books.

Alexandra Fuller's mother, Nicola, was certainly the most memorable character in "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight," her acclaimed 2001 recollection of a chaotic African childhood during the 1970s and '80s. Mum -- born in Scotland, reared in Africa -- was simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking, swigging from bottles of wine, playing bagpipe records at top volume and sleeping with an Uzi in the bed. (These were inhospitable years for white farmers in Rhodesia, soon to be Zimbab-we.) She lost three of her five children and went mad, but per- severed -- a fierce attachment to the land her one through-line.

Since that debut, Alexandra Fuller has written about a white veteran of the Rhodesian wars ("Scribbling the Cat") and a Wyoming oil-field worker ("The Legend of Colton H. Bryant"). Now she returns to her family story in "Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness." "Nicola Fuller of Central Africa," as the lady grandly christens herself, is front and center once again.

"Our Mum ... has wanted a writer in the family as long as either of us can remember," Fuller explains, "not only because she loves books and has therefore always wanted to appear in them (the way she loves large, expensive hats, and likes to appear in them) but also because she has always wanted to live a fabulously romantic life for which she needed a reasonably pliable witness as scribe."

The problem, of course, is that the writer in the family wasn't so pliable. A running motif here is Nicola's horror at her depiction in "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight" -- the "Awful Book, whose full and proper title can never be mentioned." If Nicola imagined "something along the lines of 'West With the Night,' 'The Flame Trees of Thika' or 'Out of Africa'" -- classics of colonial life in Africa -- her daughter's unromantic (if loving) book could only be a supreme disappointment.

"Cocktail Hour" offers context and sympathy for the slightly scary woman of the earlier book. Fuller writes about her mother's clannish Scots heritage and upbringing in Kenya in the 1940s and '50s. Animals were friends from an early age; Nicola's favorite playmate as a toddler was a "very, very nice, very civilized chimpanzee," and at 13 she collected prizes racing and show jumping a gorgeous bay mare named Violet. "For as long as I can remember, I have seen the world from between the ears of a horse," Nicola tells her daughter. "That's my view. Straight ahead, don't look down. Don't look back."

She never does look back -- not after her marriage, at age 20, to Alexandra's father, Tim (a more taciturn, enigmatic character). Not after she and Tim purchase a 10,000-hectare farm on the drought-ridden high veld of Rhodesia, a country that, in 1967, was an international outcast attempting to maintain white minority rule. Not after the drowning death of her 2-year-old daughter (a tragic incident seen through Alexandra's eyes in "Don't Let's Go" and revisited here from Nicola's perspective). She's reluctant even to attend her high school reunion in Kenya in 2003, but when she does, with Tim and Alexandra in tow, it provides the book with a comic set piece as Nicola embraces her old homeland with "unbridled enthusiasm."

Fuller brings us up to date with her parents, who today live on a banana and fish farm in Zambia. Though Alexandra married an American and has lived in Wyoming since 1994, she's still welcome. Despite the Awful Book. And now, the sequel. Even Nicola might concede: The scribe has done her justice.

After 'Cocktail Hour,' read these

THE FEAR: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe, by Peter Godwin (Little, Brown, $26.99). A journalist visits his birthplace after 30 years of brutal dictatorship.

ONE DAY I WILL WRITE ABOUT THIS PLACE, by Binyavanga Wainaina (Graywolf, $24). A lively memoir full of the sights, sounds and smells of a middle-class youth in Kenya.

THE FATE OF AFRICA: A History of the Continent Since Independence, by Martin Meredith (PublicAffairs, $21.99). Out Sept. 6, an updated edition of this definitive history.

EXCERPT "Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness"

By Alexandra Fuller

Nicola Fuller of Central Africa Learns to Fly

Mkushi, Zambia, circa 1986

Our Mum -- or Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, as she has on occasion preferred to introduce herself -- has wanted a writer in the family as long as either of us can remember, not only because she loves books and has therefore always wanted to appear in them (the way she likes large, expensive hats, and likes to appear in them) but also because she has always wanted to live a fabulously romantic life for which she needed a reasonably pliable witness as scribe.

"At least she didn't read you Shakespeare in the womb," my sister says. "I think that's what gave me brain damage."

"You do not have brain damage," I say.

"That's what Mum says."

"Well, I wouldn't listen to her. You know what she's like," I say.

"I know," Vanessa says.

"For example," I say, "lately, she's been telling me that I must have been switched at birth."

"Really?" Vanessa tilts her head this way and that to get a better view of my features. "Let me have a look at your nose from the other side."

"Stop it," I cover my nose.

"Well, you brought it on yourself," Vanessa says, lighting a cigarette. "You should never have written that Awful Book about her."

I count the ways that Vanessa is wrong, "For the millionth time, it's not awful and it wasn't about her."

Vanessa blows smoke at the sky placidly, "That's not what Mum says. Anyway, I wouldn't know. I haven't read it. I won't. I can't. I'm brain damaged. Ask Mum."

We're sitting outside Vanessa's rock house near the town of Kafue. Wisely, Vanessa has grown up to be an inscrutable artist -- fabric, graphics and exuberant, tropical canvasses all expressed with a kind of noncommittal chaos -- so no one can really pin anything on her. And anyway, no matter what happens, Vanessa always behaves as if everything will resolve itself in time as long as no one panics. Her bathroom, for example, has a tree growing through the middle of its thatched roof -- very romantic and picturesque but a pitiful defense against rain and reptiles. Vanessa says vaguely, "Oh, just keep your shoes on and have a good look before you sit anywhere and you should be all right."

The rest of the house, attached to the wildly impractical bathroom, has a total of three tiny rooms for Vanessa, her husband and their several children, but it is built on the summit of a kopje, so it has a sense of possibility, like a closet with cathedral ceilings. We sit outside where the air smells of miombo woodland and we smoke cigarettes and look at the comforting lights from the scores of cooking fires smoldering from the kitchens in the surrounding village. Occasionally we hear a dog barking from the taverns on the Kafue Road and soldiers in the nearby army camp shouting to one another or letting off the odd stray bullet. It's all very peaceful.

"Have another glass of wine," Vanessa suggests by way of comforting me. "You never know, Mum might forgive you eventually."

In my defense, the Awful Book, whose full and proper title can never be mentioned in the company of my family, was not all my fault. I had felt more than a little encouraged to write it -- directed, even -- by Nicola Fuller of Central Africa herself. Having given up on my older sister as a potential writer on account of Vanessa's stubborn refusal to learn how to read or write, Mum settled her literary ambitions on me. I was five when she abandoned the arithmetic section of our weekly Rhodesia Correspondence School packet. "Look Bobo," she reasoned, "numbers are boring. Anyway, you can always pay someone to count for you, but you can never pay anyone to write for you. Now," Mum paused and gave me one of her terrifying smiles. "What do you think you're going to write about?" Then she took a long sip of tea, brushed a couple of dogs off her lap and began to live a life Worthy of Fabulous Literature.

Twelve years later, Mum reviewed her life and matched it up against the kind of biography she hoped to inspire, something along the lines of "West with the Night," "The Flame Trees of Thika" or "Out of Africa." On the whole, she was satisfied. In fact, all things considered, she felt as if she even may have overdone it in some areas (tragedies, war and poverty, for example). However, there remained one glaring omission from her portfolio: there had been no airplanes, and airplanes had featured prominently in the lives of Mum's literary role models.

"And then, as if by magic," Mum says, "My Dashing Little Sri Lankan appeared."

My Dashing Little Sri Lankan did not really belong to Mum -- although there were whole moments in the course of her relationship with him when you could have been forgiven for thinking exactly that -- and there was debate in the family, some of it quite vigorous, as to whether or not he was dashing, but we could all agree that the Sri Lankan was definitely little. His real name was Mr. Vaas and he said he had come to Zambia to escape all the pain and violence of his native land.

"Then you should feel quite at home with us," Dad said, which made Mr. Vaas look at him sharply. But my father said nothing more, returning his attention calmly to Farmers Weekly.

On the whole, I took my father's side. "As usual," Mum said.

"Didn't the last pilot who stayed with us fly his plane into an electricity pole?" I asked, pouring myself another cup of tea.

Without looking up from his magazine, my father said, "I'm afraid so."

Mr. Vaas wilted somewhat.

"Don't listen to them," Mum said, steering Mr. Vaas firmly away from the veranda and tilting him across her garden -- an encouraged tangle of bougainvillea and passion fruit vines, beds of lilies and strelitzia, rows of lilac bushes and caladiums looming over borders of impatiens. Mum's current assortment of dogs gamboled at their heels. "My family bullies me terribly," she said. Mr. Vaas patted her arm tactfully, for which the little man was rewarded with a voracious smile. "You and I," Mum foretold, "will show them all what real courage looks like. We will be the Blixen and Finch Hatton of Zambia."

Mr. Vaas blinked an SOS back at me and Dad from the gloaming.

"How's that tea, Bobo?" Dad asked. "Still hot?"

Excerpted from "Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness" by Alexandra Fuller. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) Alexandra Fuller, 2011.