Thalia Book Club: Memoirs of Africa: Alexandra Fuller and Wendy Kann

Alexandra Fuller (Scribbling the Cat and Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight) and first-time author Wendy Kann (Casting with a Fragile Thread) discuss growing up in colonial Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. They tell many amusing and thoughtful anecdotes and reflect on their childhoods, the Rhodesian Bush War, revisiting a changed Africa as adults, the ties they have to the families and community that raised them in Africa, and the transition to living in the U.S. Fuller begins the evening with a hilarious introduction to her relationship with her mother and a short reading from her memoir, which is followed by Kann explaining why she decided to write a memoir and then reading from her work.

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Performance playlist:

Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier
by Alexandra Fuller

Casting with a Fragile Thread: A Story of Sisters and Africa
by Wendy Kann

Conversation
Alexandra Fuller and Wendy Kann

A Discussion with the Audience

Alexandra Fuller was born in England and moved to Rhodesia with her family when she was two. In 1980, after Rhodesia became independent as the Republic of Zimbabwe, her family moved to Malawi and then Zambia, where she met her husband. She's written two memoirs of her experience in Africa: Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, winner of the 2003 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and the 2003 Book Sense Nonfiction Book of the Year Award; and Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier, winner of the 2005 Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage. Her essays have been published in National Geographic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and many other magazines. Currently, she lives with her family in Wyoming, which is the setting of her newest work of nonfiction, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, coming out this spring.

Wendy Kann was born the eldest of three sisters in Harare, Zimbabwe, when the country was still called Rhodesia. In 1984, she met her American husband in South Africa and the couple moved to Manhattan and then later Hong Kong. Currently, she lives with her husband and children in Westport, Connecticut. She is the author of the memoir Casting with a Fragile Thread: A Story of Sisters and Africa, and is working on a novel set in contemporary Zimbabwe.