On their first date, a canoe outing in southern Africa, where they both lived, Alexandra Fuller and husband-to-be Charlie Ross were charged by an elephant. An unflustered safari leader, he held his ground. She came away impressed.

Their marriage of 20 years brought a move to America and produced three children, but it ultimately fell apart. Fuller, the author of two acclaimed, searingly honest books about her upbringing in Rhodesia and her colorful, often dysfunctional parents, discusses her third memoir – about the divorce, about her relocation to the U.S., and about her enduring connection to Africa and all she left behind there.

Most writers, she has said, have a story they can't stop telling. For Fuller, “it’s this idea of what it is to belong to a place. What happens when you are shaped, as completely as I was, by a land to which you now don't belong.”