They are from her brother, taken from their mother’s tree after failing health forces her into a care facility. The narrative begins when a large delivery of apricots arrives at Solnit’s door. Solnit’s personal “story of sorts” brings together episodes from a difficult year in her life, one that included a breakup, a brush with her own mortality, and her mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s. Shapes and lines create order out of chaos, or at least highlight possible orderly paths through it. Shape as a preoccupation makes sense in a book about storytelling. You needn’t imagine it, though: One unspooled essay runs like a news ticker along the base of every page. “Imagine all the sentences in this book as a single thread around the spool that is a book,” Solnit writes. The tipped mountain shape resembles the traditional rise and fall of story structure. The summit, a chapter titled “Knot,” evokes another of the book’s metaphors, the bringing together of narrative threads. The essays’ titles mirror or refract one another, imparting symmetry. Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, a series of essays loosely about storytelling, has a table of contents that sits on the page like a mountain tipped on its side.
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