Fault Lines, Meena Alexander's memoir, begins in a cafe where Alexander pitches the concept for the memoir to an editor who tells her to get to writing. As she tries to remember her long life, she is overwhelmed by the extreme changes she has experienced. From there, she retells her life's story starting at her birth in 1951. She was the eldest daughter of a weatherman in southern India. She and her two younger sisters lived in India until, when Alexander was five, they moved to Sudan.
Her father had a job offer in Sudan. To Meena, the change was drastic. She would occasionally return home to India for family trips, noticing each time what had changed and how different her new world was from the old life she loved so much. She reflects on memories of her grandfather in a garden of mangos and cashews and tries to communicate the paradise of that memory. She describes her education in North Africa, remembering how gender roles shaped her life there.
She remembers the way clothes mattered to her in those days as she shaped her identity, sometimes wearing conservative Muslim dress, sometimes wearing blue jeans. Eventually, Alexander moved to England. She is married and gives birth to children of her own. She discusses the way that English history intertwined with the history of Africa and India, and she reflects on the feminist issues of freedom, equality, and motherhood.
