The Faraway Nearby

Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Granta
Reviewer: Nadia Kamies 
I knew before I came to the end of this book that it would be one of those that I would reread and treasure. Solnit weaves together diverse threads of her own love, life and loss, with fairytales, travel and stories about explorers, revolutionaries and writers, like Mary Shelley, Che Guevarra and the Marquis de Sade.
One summer she receives three boxes of apricots from her mother’s tree, from the home she used to live in. As her mother descends into Alzheimer’s her life is slowly 

​unravelling – she becomes more and more confused, gets lost, locks herself out of her house – and Solnit and her brothers have to pack their mother up and move her into a seniors’ home. The apricots become a metaphor that runs throughout the book – for abundance but also for a kind of inheritance from her mother that she has to sift through, discard what is rotten, or bottle, can and preserve.
Alongside the apricots, is a trip to Iceland that she goes on as she learnt as a young woman, “never to turn down an adventure without a really good reason” and the story takes off in another direction.
Ultimately, this is a book about writing and storytelling. “Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them”, she says, and to be without a story is to be well and truly lost. We ourselves are stories and in the strongest stories we see ourselves and our connection to others through story and empathy, she adds. Ironically, her mother is losing the stories that she lived by and it changes their relationship that was always fraught with difficulties.
Solnit writes with empathy and compassion about her relationship with her mother. The book is both deeply personal and philosophical. I was interested to see the book is classified as memoir/anti-memoir. An anti-memoir is less about the author and more about the reader and this book resonated with me on many levels.