For activist and writer Rebecca Solnit (born in 1961), memory is the story that keeps us company. Hope is the memory of things yet unhappened. Through these structures, we form our consciousness. The Faraway Nearby carries us into these issues.

[The places we love] give us continuity, something to return to, and offer a familiarity that allows some portion of our own lives to remain connected and coherent. They give us an expansive scale in which our troubles are set into context, in which the largeness of the world is a balm to loss, trouble, and ugliness.

This tethering to stories and narratives echoes the words of British novelist Penelope Lively, who wrote "Memory is ballast," or German critic Walter Benjamin, who thought memory was consciousness. Through tales of her childhood, family, and things as vast as Mary Shelley's landscapes in Frankenstein and as specific as apricots, Solnit pulls the extended parts of herself back into the fold, back into a cohesive whole.

Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.

"Pink and Green" by Georgia O'Keeffe, 1960. Solnit's title refers to O'Keefe's habit of signing letters "from the faraway nearby." Learn more.

As Solnit sorts through issues like the alienation of home, the space of memory, and the piece-by-piece formation of our lives, the book's heart is her mother's Alzheimer's and Solnit's lifelong pain from their relationship.   Solnit describes rather beautifully that she was made to feel she was the "mirror" of her mother and thus, was not able to exist independently.  
"She thought of me as a mirror but didn't like what she saw and blame the mirror. When I was thirty, in one of the furious letters I sometimes composed and rarely sent, I wrote, "You want me to be some kind of a mirror that will reflect back the self-image you want to see - perfect mother, totally loved, always right - but I am not a mirror, and the shortcomings you see are not my fault."  
Read more from Solnit and others on the metaphor of mirrors as an expression of our existence and self-awareness.

My story is a variation on one I've heard from many women over the years, of the mother who gave herself away to everyone or someone and tried to get herself back from a daughter.

Solnit is gathering parts of her scattered self—or forming herself 'against the ruins' of her mother's shore. (To borrow a metaphor from T. S. Eliot). The book is not only about storytelling; it is Solnit storytelling.

Like many who turned to art to express what cannot be said, Solnit concurs, "Writing is saying to no one and every one the things it is not possible to say to someone." Telling the story becomes the means to understand.   Creating art as a means to self-express deeply hidden feelings is a core need of many artists. From sculptor Barbara Hepworth who wanted to sculpt feelings that were beyond expression, to contemporary painter Francis Bacon who worked his canvases with materials like sand and dust that reflected his own inner turbulence. For these artists and for Solnit, art is in the doing, not the having had done.

To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story or figure out how to tell yourself their story.

"On the River I" by Georgia O'Keeffe, 1965. Learn more.

In The Faraway Nearby, we join Solnit into the world's largeness and yet reach limits of understanding. There are some stories we cannot fully understand. The drawback of The Faraway Nearby is that while Solnit empathizes with her younger self, she fails to find empathy for her mother. Her mother remains a villain. Unreachable. I think Solnit is aware of this shortcoming, however.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, or to justify taking lives, even our own, by violence or by numbness and the failure to live; tell ourselves stories that save us and stories that are the quicksand in which we thrash and the well in which we drown.

From her coinage of the phrase "mansplaining" to her ever-watchful eye towards injustices, environmental degradation, and the most untouchable kernels of hope, Solnit is a consistent and contemporary force.

Accompany The Faraway Nearby with tales from unparalleled storyteller Maya Angelou, who somehow, in the middle of a horrid century, presented us with an unblinking light of being: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings or her last book before she died, Mom & Me & Mom. 

And, of course, Angelou's poetry of story.

Is it true the ribs can tell
The kick of a beast from a
Lover's fist? The bruised
Bones recorded well
The sudden shock, the
Hard impact. Then swollen lids,
Sorry eyes, spoke not
Of lost romance, but hurt

[...]

Love by nature, exacts a pain
Unequalled on the rack.
From Maya Angelou's "A Kind of Love, Some Say"

Solnit believes storytelling is bearing witness. Peer deeper into this concept with Richard Hugo on the need to "home" our creative impulse, Elie Wiesel's testimony of the Holocaust, James Baldwin's memoir of being Black in America, or my study of the limitations and burdens of being a witness. There is always an uncrossable frontier of communication when we try to understand each other. But we must still try. According to Solnit, doing so is the greatest act of love.   One of my favorite authors, Doris Lessing, another woman who was beleaguered by the concept of motherhood like Solnit, found a peace with the playing mother to stray cats. In one lovely passage in her On Cats Lessing echoes a similar sentiment to Solnit:  
"I sit down to be with him, it means slowing myself down, getting rid of the fret and urgency. Human and cat, we try to transcend what separates us."