Too many people have quit noticing Solnit’s work, primarily because vast swaths of her literary career have been given over to ideas about landscape. To state it maximally in the manner of the anonymously hateful message boards that still wish her dead, Solnit’s powerful threat to the patriarchy continues to exponentially expand.

To state it minimally, Solnit is a widely respected feminist.

Most people know her best as author of the 2008 viral Granta essay and subsequent 2014 book of same title, Men Explain Things to Me ( Granta, 2014). For a long time now, readers have counted Solnit as one of those very same forces that save. Looking back, she describes how she came to recognize that her own experiences of harassment and menace were inseparable from the systemic problem of who has a voice, or rather who is heard and respected and who is silenced-and how she was galvanized to use her own voice for change.The acknowledgements page of Rebecca Solnit‘s new memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, opens with this reflection: “I’m here because of the forces that protect the vulnerable, encourage the eccentric, and educate the ignorant” (241). She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer-books themselves the gay community that presented a new model of what else gender, family, and joy could mean and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West.īeyond being a memoir, Solnit's book is also a passionate argument: that women are not just impacted by personal experience, but by membership in a society where violence against women pervades. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher, and of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself. In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. Longlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political WritingĪn electric portrait of the artist as a young woman that asks how a writer finds her voice in a society that prefers women to be silent, from the author of Orwell's Roses Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography

Recollections of my nonexistence