Beautiful Article on Rebecca Solnit

It was Solnit who suggested that we simply walk from one point to another for our interviews, a welcome but unsurprising choice from such a passionate map lover—and the woman who wrote, in Wanderlust: A History of Walking, "I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour."

 Through her writing, Solnit has built a varied network of friends and allies. On her New York trip, she's staying in the empty apartment of installation artist Ann Hamilton, and she has coffee with Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia University student who carried a mattress with her for a year to protest the school's handling of her alleged rape. "Growing up around queer culture in San Francisco, there's a strong sense of 'Make your own family,' " Solnit says, "that your well-being depends on many relationships." Though Solnit says she isn't opposed to marriage, she's never done it, in part because she just doesn't believe in "that pioneer pair-bonding thing where all you need is your husband or wife. It's like a structure built on one pillar, and that pillar can be knocked down."

Solnit describes her younger self as "a weird, rejected, battered kid." Growing up in a middle-class suburb of San Francisco, she was the sole daughter in a "superviolent, misogynistic" family of four children, she says. Her father, Al, was a county planner with a scathing temper: "One summer evening when I was about nine," she writes in A Field Guide, "my father came home late and found a forgotten glass of chocolate milk gone sour on the kitchen counter. Waste enraged him, and since I was the principal drinker of chocolate milk, he rushed into my room, flicked the light on, and dashed it in my face as I slept." As for her mother, based on the labyrinthine portrait Solnit sketches of her in The Faraway Nearby, she'd married the wrong man—and given birth to the wrong daughter, a girl whom she thoroughly resented because of her striking physical resemblance to her mother's younger, more confident sister. Solnit says that she spent much of her youth trying to escape her family; as an adolescent, she attended a Buddhist silent retreat with one of her brother's friends, a 19-year-old gay man she deems "the first really kind male figure in my life." While, for most teenagers, 14 days without speaking would classify as a Herculean achievement, "I'd been silent for 14 years," Solnit says evenly, "so two more weeks didn't really make a difference."

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