So in one sitting early the next morning, Solnit did so, describing her encounter with a man who explained her own book to her at a party, and the silencing of women by men in general. 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.RECOLLECTIONS OF MY NONEXISTENCE By Rebecca SolnitĪt dinner one evening in 2008, Rebecca Solnit joked to a friend about writing an essay called “ Men Explain Things to Me.” The friend, who was staying with Solnit “in flight from an awful soon-to-be ex,” told her that such an essay was definitely worth writing - younger women needed it.
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 19, 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. Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography
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