No one sounded like Willis then, and no one sounds like her now: wry, playful, humble, genuinely searching, intellectually formidable. Though Willis admitted she had an addiction to being right, that didn’t mean she had an addiction to being correct. She couldn’t quite get with the left’s reflexive anti-Americanism and its preoccupation with postmodern theories that emphasized difference, which kept the left unhelpfully divided against itself. Nor was she vehemently anticapitalist; consumerism provided a little power and pleasure in a culture that didn’t give anyone much of either.

But who gets to define freedom? For Willis, this was the essential question, and those on the left were ceding precious ground if they continued to let the right talk as if conservatives had trademarked the concept. She was committed to calling out the way Americans preferred to further entrench themselves in anxiety and denial rather than live as if they really did believe in the pursuit of happiness they mouthed off about back in 1776. The year she died, Willis wrote: “If an ambivalent public hears only one side of a question, the conservative side, passionately argued . . . and they perceive that the putative spokespeople for feminism and liberalism are actually uncomfortable about advancing their views — the passionate arguers will carry the day.” We are still in desperate need of a passionate argument for a less punitive, more pleasurable life. If the culture were to believe, as Willis did, that sexual satisfaction was a human need rather than a hard-won holiday, a woman’s right to exist as both sexual being and rational creature might no longer remain at the mercy of election cycles and judicial prejudice.

Writing about Stevie Wonder, Willis noticed that he had “the power to make optimism . . . marvelously credible.” So does she. But her hope was never starry-eyed. See the last lines of an essay on the Velvet Underground. “I believe that we are all, openly or secretly, struggling against one or another kind of nihilism,” she wrote. “I believe that body and spirit are not really separate, though it often seems that way. I believe that redemption is never impossible and always equivocal. But I guess that I just don’t know.” The self-described optimist and utopian was also a self-described lover of irony, one who could look back at her ’60s self and appraise it drolly: “As the noted feminist Mick Jagger was to put it a couple of years later, American girls want everything — and I was no exception.” Her visions were rooted in a reflection on what she called the concrete realities of daily life, on our limitations and insecurities. She once wrote that the reason she preferred Lou Reed and Iggy Pop to David Bowie was that Bowie didn’t seem quite real. Or, as she explained, “Real to me, that is — which in rock and roll is the only fantasy that counts.”

For Willis, if your revolutionary thinking didn’t accurately reflect reality, it couldn’t change reality. In her version of liberation, sexual revolutionaries aren’t smug, performative hedonists who play out their fantasies in villas on Mustique; they wonder instead how thin the line is between courage and delusion while drinking coffee alone in their apartments or sitting on benches outside the Laundromat. And rock writers don’t turn their prose up to 11 to compete with the bands they’re covering, or get so bound up in the role of gnomic wizard that they can’t just shrug their shoulders and say, as Willis did, well, I was wrong about the Ramones; they admit to communing with what she called “the screaming teenager” inside. To Willis, acknowledging the real meant acknowledging that we are minds connected to bodies, and that what may not seem real at all — the unconscious and the psyche — are very powerful forces. Nearly every piece is a reminder that the culture we live in, even when we don’t profess its prevailing beliefs, has an effect on the psyche; that we internalize expectations even when we think we’re free; that we need to gather in groups to change our minds and the minds of others, because otherwise we stand alone in our pain and confusion, thinking that we’re the problem.

One of the book’s best essays is about a trip to Israel, when Willis immersed herself in the Orthodox Judaism her brother had given his life over to. In it Willis portrays herself, often comically, as both stiff-necked and nearly seduced by the promise of silencing her own struggles. “Find out what you’re living for, Ellen!” a rabbi says to her during that journey. “Clarity or death!” Each sentence in this collection bears the mark of a writer haunted by the notion that without a constant search for clarity on what mattered most to her, she would never realize the life — or love, or society — she hoped for. If we persist in thinking that the members of her generation deceived themselves when they believed they were beginning to see the light, we deserve every bit of darkness that is blinding us now. For those of us who would rather not get fooled again, we have these 513 pages as a guide.