Recollections of My Non-Existence
Reviews
Really well thought out construction of a memoir told through so many different peoples’ stories, but still all through Solnit’s lenses of thinking. The sections on how Solnit perceives herself as a writer and her processes of actually writing were my favorite parts, with her stories of national parks coming in close behind. I didn’t realize this was a more recent publication until she made the jump from the Iraq war to #metoo, but that didn’t stop the sections from clearly and correctly telling their individual stories. I think this book could have ended fifty pages earlier but I’m glad it didn’t.
Highlights
From childhood onward, we were instructed to not do things—not go here, not work there not go out at this hour or talk to those people or wear this dress or drink this drink or partake of adventure, independence, solitude; refraining was the only form of safety offered from the slaughter.
When she grew old and forgetful she often sat on her wooden front steps facing south, and when I'd stop to chat, she'd tell me about growing up on a fruit farm in Georgia and ow beautiful the fruit trees were. It was as though on those steps she was sitting in two times and places, as though in each conversation she summoned her lost world until we were both in the shade of her beloved orchards. Sometimes I imagined all these old people asleep in the homes around me dreaming of the places they came from, imagined the phantoms of those fields and orchards, dirt roads and flat horizons, shimmering in our middle-of-the-night streets.
"If I had luck in all this, it was the luck of being able to continue to evolve, of being someone gradually, imperceptibly changing, sometimes by intention, sometimes by increments and impulses invisible to me."