Early in The Faraway Nearby, a book about memory, loss and storytelling, Rebecca Solnit writes of one August when she found herself the recipient of 100lb of apricots. She spread the fruit on the floor of her bedroom to slow its decay. “I had expected them to look like abundance itself,” she writes, “and they looked instead like anxiety, because every time I came back there was another rotten one or two or three or dozen to cull.”

The fruit required immediate action, but also prompted reflection: “The reasons I came to have a heap of apricots on my bedroom floor are complicated. They came from my mother’s tree, from the home she no longer lived in, in the summer when a new round of trouble began.” That trouble was her mother’s advancing Alzheimer’s disease, and what follows is not so much a memoir as a meditation about stories – how we tell them, why we need them, what they mean.

The apricots prompted Solnit to reread fairytales, with their heaps of abundance, and she came to believe that each one was a riddle to decipher, “a tale whose meaning I had to make over the course of the next 12 months as almost everything went wrong”. She revisits the stories of Cinderella, Scheherazade, Frankenstein and the turbulent life of its creator, Mary Shelley, thinking about how these tales change with each retelling – and what each version reveals about the storyteller. She compares the bitter, difficult relationship between herself and her mother to that of Snow White and the Queen, and in an early chapter describes herself as the mirror into which her mother peered, dissatisfied with the image reflected back at her.

For more than 200 pages, Solnit writes about, around and through the meaning of stories. This is narrative as jazz improv, each refrain exploring a new melody or theme. Yet familiar strains recur again and again. Metaphors abound, and Solnit seems to believe that all of life could be looked at as an allegory to be deciphered.

Amid the chaos of her mother’s decline, Solnit faces her own health scare. The night before an operation, she takes a walk by the sea and notices the footprints in the sand: “I like to see the long line we each leave behind, and I sometimes imagine my whole life that way, as though each step was a stitch, as though I was a needle leaving a trail of thread that sewed together the world as I went by, crisscrossing others’ paths, quilting it all together in some way that matters even though it can hardly be traced.”

Solnit is an intrepid explorer of ideas, and she is not afraid to wander off the narrative path (her best-known book, after all, is A Field Guide to Getting Lost). This can make the digressions in her work frustrating. Eventually, though, she circles back to her central obsession: the power of storytelling. A false story can harm, a truthful one can illuminate. A story told well can help us understand ourselves and the world. Stories are, she notes, not only quests for meaning, they are also vehicles for empathy. “Not to know yourself is dangerous, to that self and to others,” she writes. “You see it in the small acts of everyday life, of the person who feels perfectly justified, of the person who doesn’t know he’s just committed harm … of the person we’ve all been at one time or another.”

Revisiting her 2004 book Hope in the Dark, Solnit recently wrote in the Guardian that “it is not the belief that everything was, is or will be fine … Hope is an embrace of the unknown.” Stories, then, are a way to understand what does happen. We need hope – and stories – when we don’t know how to make sense of our lives or of the world. And so her ode to a well-told tale may sit on the bookshelf for ages, held in reserve for the right moment to be read. She seems to admit as much: “Pared back, [this] is a history of an emergency and the stories that kept me company then.”

The Faraway Nearby is, inevitably, bookended by pain and grief. Alzheimer’s arrives on the doorstep and turns into the visitor who won’t go away. “Time itself is a tragedy, and most of us are fighting a war against it,” Solnit writes. “Our victories are only delays…” The apricots on the floor of her bedroom will not be ripe forever. Everything is changing, always, forever.