Telling Stories About Ourselves In 'The Faraway Nearby'
Rebecca Solnit begins her new memoir, The Faraway Nearby, with a question: "What's your story?"
"It's all in the telling," she says. "Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of the world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice."
In her book, Solnit explores her tempestuous relationship with her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer's before her death. She weaves in being a writer in residence in Iceland and examines the stories of Scheherazade and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
"We think we tell stories," she says, "but often stories tell us."
Solnit tells weekends on All Things Considered host Jackie Lyden about receiving a "fairy-tale" gift from her mother: one hundred pounds of apricots.
"Every time I looked at it," Solnit says, "there were a few more going bad. And so it became a pile of anxiety. I was always looking to see what was going wrong rather than just feeling this super-abundance of apricots."