'Move over, Joan Didion" was the headline on a profile of Rebecca Solnit published in her hometown newspaper the San Francisco Chronicle a decade ago. Both women grew up in California and are authors of highly distinctive journalism. Both have written on the American west, about politics, culture and family – Solnit most recently in The Faraway Nearby.
Both pioneered a unique style – Didion in her groundbreaking journalism of the 1960s and 70s, Solnit in the literary prose she has evolved since the late 1980s. But if their similarities are part of a story about how authors have stretched non-fiction forms to accommodate new ways of thinking and reporting, their differences are more striking.
Most obvious among these, age aside (at 78, Didion is a generation ahead of 52-year-old Solnit), is the fact that Didion left California. Solnit stayed, and the place and her sense of it are integral to who she is, what she does. "The best and worst thing about my work is that it's inseparable from my life," she says over tea in a London hotel, "and it infiltrates every corner."
She arrived on a flight from California the day before our meeting and has just woken up. She is husky and a little dreamy. It suits her. Although she makes a chunk of her living from public speaking and prides herself on her fluency, Solnit is also the champion of a style of writing that loops, circles, changes direction.
Her commitment to this kind of language, and the loose, associative thought processes that lie behind it, is one reason Solnit never took a job as a regular reporter. "I could never attain that perfectly flat voice that I think is as affected a style as any but that's supposed to be the style of objectivity," she once told the Columbia Journalism Review. As a postgraduate journalism student, she annoyed her tutor. "My sentences kind of curve around and enclose more description and opinion. My work is very meandering, not in the sense of not knowing where it's going, but in making scenic detours and connecting up things that might not be connected in a linear narrative."
Solnit can be direct when she wants to. A recent article depicted the giant technology corporations of the Bay Area as an invading army, while her book-length essay Hope in the Dark, written as a response to the Iraq war and the failure of activists to prevent it, is a manifesto for protest.
But the new book is much closer to her self-description as a wanderer, and her most introspective work to date. Its title, The Faraway Nearby, is borrowed from the painter Georgia O'Keeffe, who used it in letters to distant friends after moving to New Mexico, and its overarching theme is empathy and the boundaries between people. In part, it is the story of Solnit's mother's decline into Alzheimer's, and Solnit's struggle to be reconciled with her. Disappointed with her own life, her mother envied her looks and her freedom. But Solnit, who completed the book a few months before her mother died, needed to forgive her, and her chapters pursue lines of thought about solidarity and selfishness in a series of essays on Che Guevara, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and her own travels in Iceland.
"How do we develop empathy and how does it shut down? It's often seen as an emotional quality, a virtue, and not really as a factor of mind," Solnit says, "but you really have to tell the story of those people far away and what will happen to them … Stories are the bridges we build between the island republics of ourselves, so it's a book about the movement in and out of the self and a book that asks how you can become disconnected."
Some critics have been sceptical of Solnit's attempt to harness private experiences of illness and ageing to this more philosophical enquiry and wished for a straightforward account ("why did she dislike her mother?" asked one reviewer), but Solnit says: "I had a lot of fun with letting the writing run away with itself. I'm interested in the meanings and ideas that arise, rather than doing a definitive, blow-by-blow description of some passage in my life." At her behest, the British edition's jacket is tagged "Memoir/Anti-Memoir", which delights her.
"In creative writing programmes in the US you meet all these 23-year-olds writing their memoirs and I always want to throw some kind of hand grenade made out of experimental prose or force-feed them Orwell and Borges until something more interesting comes out," she says. "Memoirs are odd in that they greatly resemble novels in terms of plot and character, and our lives aren't really very much like novels."
For 25 years, Solnit has supported herself as, what her website styles, an "independent writer", unattached to any magazine or university and without a salary. She laughs as she says she is thinking of throwing a party to mark the anniversary. "In the early days I would measure my success by how many weeks or months it was since I had to do office temp work, and then the office temp work fell by the wayside. I was always making a very modest income, but I was thrilled to be doing the work – or thrilled when I wasn't cursing under my breath. But I would end by saying, 'These are the problems I wanted to have. If your editor is driving you nuts, then you have an editor and you're being published.'"
Today her life is comfortable. A handful of her most original books, notably her award-winning study of photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge and Wanderlust: A History of Walking, have achieved the degree of mainstream success that brings security. She receives more requests than she can deal with, spends around a third of her time travelling, and has longstanding relationships with her US agent and editor – though she also continues to publish with smaller, specialist outlets. Her next book will be an atlas of New Orleans modelled on one she made of San Francisco that surprised her by becoming a bestseller. A third atlas of New York is planned.
But the going has not been easy. She says she had about 15 years "when absolutely no one wanted to be me" but she was used to fending for herself. She enrolled at the American university in Paris for a year after leaving school and home – "which always sounds glamorous, and it was" – but she had no money and sometimes went hungry. "I was terribly poor and living in maids' rooms. I ran out of steam for being a teenage expatriate and a starving person. Paris is a tough city in its own way, and being around rich kids was tough as well." She went home to San Francisco, where she worked her way through an English degree and graduate journalism school at Berkeley.
A programme at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art helped fund her tuition, and her first, poorly paid work was as a critic and editor. She found herself drawn to the world of art and artists, which she calls "a sort of philosophy through material means, you can do absolutely anything". Her first book was a study of the artists who were lesser-known contemporaries of the Beat generation poets, and she authored and contributed to several books and catalogues about art and the American west in the 1990s.
The US environmental movement has its roots in the northwest with the founding of the Sierra Club in 1892. Writers and artists were active in the organisation from its earliest days, and while Solnit, daughter of a town planner, was always a city person, as a young woman she began to make trips to the celebrated outdoor places of the wild west. She became interested in their histories, not least what she called the unfinished war against Native Americans.
Solnit is the third of four siblings and her parents' only daughter. She has written of "terrible things" happening in the family home – her father once woke her in the night by throwing chocolate milk in her face – and, when I ask, confirms he was violent while making it clear she doesn't want to say any more about this, mainly out of consideration for her brothers' privacy. Her mother left and her parents' protracted divorce overshadowed Solnit's adolescence. After leaving home she was cut off financially. What was salvaged from this wreck was her affection for her brothers. The Faraway Nearby describes how the adult siblings shared the care of their fading mother, and how Rebecca was protected from her mother's more unreasonable expectations.
Politically the family leaned left. Solnit's father, whose family were eastern European Jews traumatised by antisemitism, battled Bay Area developers. Her mother, originally an Irish Catholic New Yorker, was active in the civil rights movement. Both marched against the Vietnam war, but Solnit says it was the influence of her younger brother, David, with whom she first went to the Nevada nuclear test site in 1988 and spent time with cowboys and Indians, that turned her from an observer of politics into an activist.
"I would have been a completely different person without the politics and a completely different writer," she says. "I sometimes say the test site taught me to write. It was such an intense physical and social experience and a place with so many histories and populations converging on it. That was where I found the style I still write in, that fluidity from first-person to narrative historical things."
For five years she returned to the test site annually, and it became a "compelling centre" in her life at the same time she was becoming more interested in green issues. Her sense of places – whether buildings, cities or natural wonders such as the Grand Canyon – as generators of meanings, as well as her interest in picking apart these layers, has been a feature of her work ever since, and has seen her described as a psychogeographer alongside writers Iain Sinclair and WG Sebald.
Infinite City – her book of San Francisco maps and essays on subjects including Native American place names, and the fruit of extensive collaboration with cartographers and designers – is, I think, the most original expression of this outlook. This autumn's New Orleans sequel, Unfathomable City, is an enticing prospect. Solnit went to New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina to report what she found there, resulting in her excellent book A Paradise Built in Hell.
She began the book, partly inspired by 1989's San Francisco earthquake, before Katrina, with the argument that disasters can bring people together in wonderful ways. Initial reports from the city appalled her, and while it remains a stretch to call the apocalyptic mess left by the floods a "paradise" of any sort, Solnit succeeded in showing that, far from the looting and pillaging maniacs depicted by politicians and mainstream media (she highlights a Guardian article by Timothy Garton Ash), many of the poor black citizens of New Orleans behaved heroically.
Spending time in New Orleans, she says, made her see what is "insufferable" about her hometown. She rails against rent rises, evictions and tech corporations that ferry employees to and from "campuses" in private buses, rather than invest in public transportation, and she is sceptical too about the technology itself.
"So little is being said about this new economy and culture. One of the essays I want to write is about that old, slow world you could describe the way George Eliot described life before the railroad. It's like 1995 or something, you know, when there were computers but you really only had your own words on them so it was really your desk and not your cocktail party. We still had this stately life where you read the newspaper in the morning and listened to the news in the evening. Letters arrived once a day, and usually when you made a phone call, you were in a stable situation. It feels very lost now and it's odd for me, as somebody who is not quite an anachronism but deeply rooted in the past, to be in the place where all that is being swept away."
She refers to her previous apartment's "horrific proximity to the tie-dye of the Haight-Ashbury" – lest anyone should mistake her for a hippie – and has recently moved further east. Solnit is not leaving San Francisco. "There's still a lot of things I like: our food is better than anyplace else, it's a Mediterranean climate, we have the second largest wine-growing region, we're on the ocean. There hasn't been a place that's more compelling."
She is also put off by the more rigid hierarchies of the east coast. When I ask about Didion she says that while she admires her range, class divides them: "You read The Year of Magical Thinking" – Didion's memoir – "and there's a lot of very expensive real estate and dresses in there which I found disconcerting." And she is shocked by the way easterners routinely trot out Ivy League credentials. "It's like, why? I would never talk about where I went to school, but it's how they do it back there. Those are very expensive private schools, so it's like being an Etonian."
San Francisco, she says, is also a good place to be single. "There is a sense in queer culture that your friends are your family and you do see in other places that people pair up and everything else falls away." When she was ill recently, she relied on a circle of close friends and, although she has had long-term relationships with men, this suits her. Her parents' example made her anxious about dependency, and she views traditional marriage, through a feminist lens, as a hierarchy.
She visited Occupy Wall Street three times, has worked with climate change campaign 350.org and is thinking about a break from books to make more time for activism. But her primary commitment is to writing. As a young woman, she imagined the stories or poems she might one day produce, but authors including Virginia Woolf and the Latin Americans Borges, Eduardo Galeano and Subcommandante Marcos convinced her she could do everything she wanted in non-fiction.
"There's often a sense in the US that it's either/or, that you're doing some very lapidary, disengaged thing, or you're doing politics without any sense of aesthetics about the writing. Woolf is one of the most important writers for me and what I love is her range from the most lyrical introspection to the intense political engagement of Three Guineas or 'Professions for Women'".
In an era when producers of much western culture seem unwilling even to acknowledge the political challenges facing us, the looming environmental crisis above all, Solnit – serious about both art and the world – is herself a role model.
