Alzheimer’s disease is a cruel paring away of the agility of the mind and of personal memory. Rebecca Solnit’s new book explores these nuances through her experience of looking after her mother, who struggled with the illness, and uses this to explore other subtle cruelties that emanated from her childhood. “To love someone is to put yourself in their place,” she writes, “which is to put yourself in their story.” Through this Solnit is able to reveal the complex maps that make us all so different yet so connected.
Her own map unfolds over a year in which she is coping with breast cancer, the end of a relationship, her mother’s Alzheimer’s and a residency at the Library of Water in Iceland.
When she is given three boxes of apricots from her mother’s neglected tree, she sees it much as she sees life, “a story waiting to be told, a riddle to be solved, and a harvest to be processed”. The fruit is, at different turns, a story of ripening or rotting in waiting, and she often asks, “What’s your story?” – a rhetorical question that illustrates how for her, as for any of us, it is an ongoing process.
The fruit becomes a catalyst – “the fruit on my floor made me start to read fairy tales again” – and her work begins to resemble a sad, strange fairy tale, folded into memoir. At 17 she left home, and was given a broken travel clock and a broken suitcase by her parents. This sense of brokenness darts around the writing like a firefly, illuminating often darker undertones. Solnit reveals that her mother was “devoured by envy for decades”, an envy that centred on her daughter, and although her mother would eventually forget all of these feelings Solnit increasingly becomes her tender caretaker.
This off-kilter mirroring emerges throughout the work, from the title of contents to the line of parallel text that runs on the bottom of every page – something Solnit has used in earlier work, such as Wanderlust: A History of Walking and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Here the parallel text takes as its focus a species of Madagascar moth that drinks "the tears of sleeping birds", revealing much more philosophical truth about ourselves.
Her grasp on the duality of living is richly drawn, and radiant with empathy; her mother’s degenerative illness is placed alongside her own preventative breast-cancer surgery, just as an imperfect memory of picking apricots from her mother’s tree is placed alongside the fact that it was actually her brother. Notions of personal experience and memory are picked over; illness becomes a metaphor, to show “the dark side of the moon we call being human”, and the cold climate of Iceland becomes a warm sanctuary when she takes up the Library of Water’s offer to be its writer-in-residence.
Iceland provides one of the highlights of the book. It is “strange as another planet”, but the “far north” becomes a perfect landscape for convalescence and renewal (“cold slows things down”) and provides a bridge back to the swirling narrative of illness that frames the beginning of the book.
This is no ordinary memoir. It is an extraordinary piece of work in which the personal and philosophical meet. Solnit’s mind is dizzyingly expansive, making poetic and sometimes less obvious connections between influences and experiences, from the Marquis de Sade and Che Guevara to Road Runner and Frankenstein, reflecting that we are all many ideas stitched clumsily together.
Solnit’s execution of this idea is anything but clumsy; the book’s title is borrowed from the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, who wrote in 1976 that the “Far Away” was a “beautiful,untouched lonely-feeling place” but who believed that the “lonely-feeling” was a gift. This is the conclusion Solnit arrives at: she describes her successful cancer treatment as helping her to be cured of more than she had been diagnosed with. She learns to ask for help, and finds that the bonds that grow from that tie us together.
Empathy is the most important part of the book, and Solnit has empathy for many, from her mother to the Madagascan moth. There are connections here for all: “Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds. The birds sleep on, inadvertent givers. The moths fly on, enriched. We feed on sorrows, on stories, on the spaciousness they open up when they let us travel in our imagination beyond our own limits, when they dissolve the boundaries that confine us and urge us to extend the potentialities of our imperfect, broken, incomplete selves. Those apricots my brother brought me in three big cardboard boxes long ago, were they tears too? And this book, is it tears? Who drinks tears, who has your wings, who hears your story?”
