If ships at a distance carry every man's dreams on board, as Zora Neale Hurston wrote in Their Eyes Were Watching God, then ships at proximity carry the realization or denial of those dreams.

In Alexandra Fuller's third memoir LEAVING BEFORE THE RAINS COME, the ships are people, and they carry dreams and so much more: desires, expectations, genes, children, disappointments, denials. They run aground, drift together, drift apart, and make, sails billowing, for happier waters. Except that in this book there are no purely happy waters.

Fuller was born into the bullet bright world of the Rhodesian wars. Her British ex-pat farmer parents respond to the uncertainty of violence and agriculture by cultivating an absurd eccentricity.

When the Fullers' car, a red Peugeot 403, rusts through the bottom, her mother covers the holes with painted bits of cardboard. "'I wouldn't stand on it if I were you,'" she cautions Fuller and her sister, "'or you'll plop right out.'"

Meanwhile, her father insists the family be bathed and dressed every night for dinner, to which he brings a pistol and expectation for lively conversation. If her parents are boats, they are tin dinghies: intimate, shiny from afar, and as pocked with rust in important places as the family car.

They are vital people, but their strange behavior is alienating, and Fuller craves more stability.

When she meets Charlie Ross, an American guiding river tours on the Zambezi, she feels she has finally met someone who can navigate between the Technicolor world of her parents and the dull brown world of Western routine, just as he expertly steers his boats among the currents.

They marry and move to Idaho, have children. If Ross is a boat, he is a canoe: lithe, capable, sturdy. But not, perhaps, suited to the high seas. He carries Fuller's dream of a perfect life on board, and in the end cannot bear the weight.

Using the trajectory of their marriage as an outline, the book considers hereditary sorrow, the interconnectedness of people, our relationship to the land, to parents, the American Dream, and so much more in prose that is as clear and bright as Grand Teton melt water. Reading BEFORE THE RAINS COME is like riffling through the old letters of a dear pen pal, with all of their lovely, long distance intimacy.

And that is surely the phrase for it, long distance intimacy. The people in this book are painted with precise, vivid strokes but retain the quality of the unknowable. When Fuller asks how her parents stayed married so long, her father responds that he always gave her mother "loads of room." Fuller perfectly captures the experience of trying, sometimes failing, to bridge that gulf.

She is not a boat but a submarine, able both to ride the enormous swells of life and to dive deep to discover their Tectonic origin.