'The Faraway Nearby' by Rebecca Solnit

A pile of apricots stands at the beginning of a difficult year for Solnitt. Her mother's worsening dementia intensifies their always difficult relationship, and a health scare and a friend’s death send her clutching at loose threads of her life. Solnitt’s interest is in the ambivalences of closeness and distance, coldness and warmth, change and preservation, darkness and light, and in the way our instinct to tell stories both limits and liberates us. After a journey to Iceland and peregrinations through folklore, literature, science, history and analogy, Solnitt returns, sturdier at the year’s end, more accepting of time’s effect on her life.

Nov 2013