The Faraway Nearby

REBECCA Solnit’s new book is a collection of memoir-based essays, each of which focuses on a break-up, a significant personal health problem or, most prominently, her mother’s worsening struggle with Alzheimer’s.

From the opening essay, the narrative tone is set: thoughtful, provocative, meandering. This collection is a philosophical consideration of the nature of storytelling that conflates fact and magical fiction, past and present, ripeness and inevitable decay.