She turned a particularly glaring light on her mother's problems with alcohol and mental illness.Īs she trudged up the mountain road here in Wyoming, Ms. Fuller put the warts of her parents' personal lives - especially their racial attitudes - on public display. ''I have been writing these details down ever since I was 5 years old,'' she said. She said she had no difficulty recalling the sensory details that permeate and enliven her book (the ''woo-ooping'' of nightjars, jackals and hyenas the crackle of dried grass the viscous gleam of a human body slathered in fresh blood). in the early winter of 1999, she wrote as fast as she could type until her family began making noises about breakfast. She knocked out her 301-page memoir in about six weeks. I decided to be honest about race and about alcohol.'' ''In fiction, I kept apologizing for behavior for which there is no apology. ''It was the lack of judgment in that book that freed me up,'' Ms. Without moralizing or judgment, the book tells unsettling stories of working-class parents, relatives and adults who often behave badly. Fuller then discovered a paperback copy of ''The Liars' Club,'' a 1995 memoir by Mary Karr. ''Yet they had a complete lack of realization of what they really needed.'' ''So many of them were so demanding,'' she said.

Work put her in proximity to the many rich Americans who have vacation homes around Jackson Hole. When she wasn't exercising or writing books that no one wanted to publish, she worked: as a waitress at the Snake River Grill in Jackson Hole, as an office manager for a local environmental group, as a copy editor for a local newspaper. That's because until the reviews came in (writing in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called her book a ''gripping memoir'' made of ''stark, matter-of-fact reminiscences about her childhood and fierce, Dinesen-esque paeans to the land of Africa'') there were no fruits. Fuller has had sound reason to fret about escaping her talent or the fruits thereof. It is only since her book came out in December, though, that Ms. ''When I am climbing, there is a sense that all the talent and looks and whatever else we hang our identity on mean nothing.'' ''There is a rope between you and a big splat,'' she said. Twice, she has scaled the Grand Teton, a 13,770-foot peak that requires some technical climbing skills and considerable endurance. When the snow melts, she rides her horse and trail bikes and runs up low mountains. She skies cross-country for three hours nearly every winter day. Searching for the familiar ground of hardship, she exercises. Still, she's uneasy with what she says is the unreal ease of life in the United States. ''If I wasn't aware, I would be unconscious and arrogant.'' ''Yes, I am aware of the ironies here,'' she said with a nod toward the custom-built mountainside house, the garage with its two S.U.V.'s, the Arabian horse she boards at a neighbor's ranch and the other signifiers of affluence that have settled around her family since it settled in Wyoming. She concedes, though, that her protests sound a bit tinny. Bush's first instruction to the American people after 9/11 was to go forth and go shopping. ''I hate the construction of 8,000-square-foot houses with a dozen bathrooms. ''I hate the celebration of wealth in this country,'' she said.

''If we had landed in Idaho Falls, you can bet I would have been on the next bloody boat home,'' she said. She quickly came to appreciate that Jackson Hole, in large part because of the wealth and worldliness of its vacationing rich people, is considerably more cosmopolitan than its Rocky Mountain environs. Fuller said she had no idea what she was getting into. Ross's grandmother owned a farm near the Tetons, and he spent many summers there as a child. Fuller and her husband, Charlie Ross, who met and married in Zambia when he was a safari guide, moved to the United States in 1994 to give their children (Sarah was born in Zambia Fuller in Wyoming) a grounding in America. Having grown up smoking cigarettes, drinking beer and eating whatever wild game her father managed to shoot, she has become a nonsmoking vegetarian who often rails against the ''tasteless fast food eaten by Americans who are out of touch with reality.'' She has acquired a soft-spoken American husband who sells real estate, and two exceedingly polite children, ages 8 and 5, who are rarely allowed to watch television and never allowed to eat at McDonald's.

Wyoming scenery