Recollections of My Nonexistence
2020
- women authors
- authors, american
- authors, biography
- american women authors
- biography
- women
- social conditions
- biography & autobiography / personal memoirs
- biography & autobiography / women
- social science / women's studies
The story
"In this memoir, celebrated author, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit relates how she found her voice as a writer and as a feminist during the 1980s in San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. Then in her early twenties, Solnit tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city, which became her great teacher; of the small apartment she found, which became a home in which to metamorphosize; of how punk rock gave form and voice to her own fury and explosive energy. Solnit explores the way some men attempted to erase her, to shut her up, keep her out and challenge her credibility, as well as contemplating other kinds of nonexistence of groups for gender, ethnicity, and orientation. Her book ends with what liberated her as a person and as a writer--books themselves, the gay men and community who presented a new model of what else gender, family, and celebration could be, and her awakening to the spacious landscapes of the American west, which taught her how to write in the way she has ever since. Recollections of My Nonexistence connects Solnit's hugely popular polemical feminist writings of the last decade with the more lyrical, personal writing of her beloved earlier books A Field Guide to Getting Lost and The Faraway Nearby. This book is for everyone who has endured erasure and dismissal while coming of age in male-dominated spaces"--
What it’s like
Unhurried, reflective prose that moves like a long walk through a city at dusk, with the rhythm of a thinker turning an idea over until it catches the light. The sensory world is San Francisco in the 1980s: fog-cooled streets, cramped rented rooms, the grit of punk shows and the open sweep of the western landscape arriving late in the book like a window thrown open. Sentences are long and essayistic, dotted with sudden images and quiet asides, so the reading feels like sitting in a sunlit corner with a notebook rather than being carried along by suspense. The vibe is contemplative and bracing, a mix of wistful solitude and righteous anger that softens into tenderness toward friends, found family, and the self being slowly built. Its intensity is emotional rather than graphic: street harassment, dismissal, and the cruelty of being talked over are described plainly, with no gore and little explicit violence. It suits a slow weekend morning, a stretch of quiet evenings, or a reader who wants company in thinking about belonging. It is for women and anyone who has been made to feel invisible in rooms that were not built for them, and for readers who love memoir that braids personal history with social observation.
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