A Field Guide to Getting Lost

A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2025) is a collection of essays by Rebecca Solnit. Blending autobiography, history, philosophy, and cultural criticism, Solnit examines the value of wandering away from the known in order to encounter new ways of being. The essays draw on a wide range of references—music, painting, poetry, personal history, and current events—to illustrate how losing one’s bearings can become a catalyst for personal and cultural renewal. The essays meditate on Disorientation as Discovery and Transformation, Longing and Uncertainty as Destination, and The Interplay of Memory, Landscape, and Identity.

Rebecca Solnit is a historian and activist whose work covers a wide range of topics, including feminism, social criticism, and Indigenous history.

This guide uses the 2005 paperback edition from Penguin Random House.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain references to child abuse, substance abuse, and mental illness.

Summary

In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit frames her study of disorientation around a central paradox: Humans long for certainty, but growth often requires surrendering control. The book is structured as a series of loosely connected essays, each of which explores a different dimension of loss, absence, or longing. Solnit argues that losing one’s way—whether geographically, emotionally, or intellectually—is not simply a failure but a necessary condition for self-discovery.

The book opens with Solnit’s assertion that, in order to truly live, one must get lost. The first essay “Open Door” explores a memory of Passover when Solnit’s family set a glass of wine for the prophet Elijah and left the door open for his arrival. The detail of the door becomes her central symbol, invoking an invitation to uncertainty, to what is unknown. To be lost, she argues, is to be fully present and capable of living in mystery. Solnit connects the etymology of the word “lost” to stories of search-and-rescue in which adults resist admitting disorientation while children accept it. Being lost, she concludes, is a necessary skill, one that points toward transformation.

In the second chapter, Solnit introduces an important motif in the book: The blue of distance. Blue symbolizes longing for what cannot be attained. Through examples from art history, she shows how artists began painting distance as blue to capture desire itself. The chapter insists that longing and uncertainty are not failures but destinations, shaping identity through absence.

Chapter 3 centers on Solnit’s personal ancestral history. She braids together family history, memory, and the problem of knowing the past when the record is fragmentary. Much of Solnit’s family history arrives in contradictions. Photographs and artifacts serve as both evidence and mystery. For Solnit, her family’s legacy is not a stable story but an inheritance of fragmentation, something that deserves to be embraced.

Chapter 4 turns to captivity narratives to explore metamorphosis, including those of Eunice Williams and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. These stories show that being lost does not always mean being destroyed but often leads to being remade. Solnit draws a parallel to butterflies emerging from cocoons, where life depends on shedding what came before. She reflects on the symbolism of the instar, the stage between molts, and determines that metamorphosis requires leaving something behind.

In Chapter 5, Solnit recalls her experience coming of age in the 1980s punk scene. There, she encountered a wilderness of another kind: Urban ruins. Solnit uses the ruins as a symbol of leaving the past behind. She recalls her friend Delphine, a cellist whose life embodied wildness and change. Solnit admired her vitality but recognized the paradox of her beauty. Delphine’s sudden death haunts the chapter. Ruins, like Delphine’s life, are fragile remnants, reminders that endings and decay can also be beginnings.

Chapter 6 uses country music and the blues to continue the symbol of the blue of the horizon. What struck her most about songs by artists like Tanya Tucker and Patsy Cline was their sense of place. The landscape in these songs became a track of memory, tethering experience to space. Chapter 7 continues to explore how love, landscape, and loss intersect as Solnit shares a relationship she had with a hermit in the Mojave Desert.

In Chapter 8, Solnit turns her attention to the artist and judo master Yves Klein, whose work is known for the color blue. Solnit uses Klein to bookend a discussion about maps and unknown landscapes. Chapter 9 focuses on Solnit’s childhood home and the ways in which loss is sometimes forced.