Name: biddy's review of Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit
Item: Recollections of My Nonexistence
Author: biddy

Rebecca Solnit

"A marvel: a memoir that details her awakening as a feminist, an environmentalist, and a citizen of the world. Every single sentence is exquisite." --Maris Kreizman, Vulture An 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 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. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher; of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself; of how punk rock gave form and voice to her own fury and explosive energy. Solnit recounts how she came to recognize the epidemic of violence against women around her, the street harassment that unsettled her, the trauma that changed her, and the authority figures who routinely disdained and disbelieved girls and women, including her. Looking back, she sees all these as consequences of the voicelessness that was and still is the ordinary condition of women, and how she contended with that while becoming a writer and a public voice for women's rights. She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer--books themselves, the gay men around her who offered other visions of what gender, family, and joy could be, and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West. These influences taught her how to write in the way she has ever since, and gave her a voice that has resonated with and empowered many others.

A Memoir

Recollections of My Nonexistence

biddy

To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once. "The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world," said Edgar Allan Poe, who must not have imagined it from the perspective of women who prefer to live. I was trying not to be the subject of someone else's poetry and not to get killed; I was trying to find a poetics of my own, with no maps, no guides, not much to go on. They might have been out there, but I hadn't located them yet.

The struggle to find a poetry in which your survival rather than your defeat is celebrated, perhaps to find your own voice to insist upon that, or to at least find a way to survive amidst an ethos that relishes your erasures and failures is work that many and perhaps most young women have to do. In those carly years, I did not do it particularly well or clearly, but I did it ferociously. I was often unaware of what and why I was resisting, and so my defiance was murky, incoherent, erratic. Those years of not succumbing, or of succumbing like someone sinking into a morass and then flailing to escape, again and again, come back to me now as I see young women around me fighting the same battles. The fight wasn't just to survive bodily, though that could be intense enough, but to survive as a person possessed of rights, including the right to participation and dignity and a voice. More than survive, then: to live.

Karolina

What is won or changed or fixed has to be maintained and protected or it can be lost. What goes forward can go backward. Efficiency says that grief should follow a road map and things should be gotten over and that then there should be that word that applies to wounds and minds both: closure. But time and pain are a more fluid, unpredictable business, expanding and contracting, closing and opening and changing.

Nonfiction is at its best an act of putting the world back together—or tearing some piece of it apart to find what’s hidden beneath the assumptions or conventions—and in this sense creation and destruction can be akin.

Sometimes when you are devastated you want not a reprieve but a mirror of your condition or a reminder that you are not alone in it.

lilith

went into this collection of essays without ever having read Solnit and left astounded by the mastery of language and form. a series of interconnected essays that speak to Solnit's poetics, activism, and life, this essay-collection-actually-memoir is teaching me so much about building causality, scene, and tension within the short-form essay. also just love when a feminist writer waymarks the way she became the writer she came to be despite the obstacles presented to the non-male writer. delicious

Solnit’s writing makes so much more sense now that it’s rooted in her personal story. She weaves through painful memories with such grace.

elif sinem

One of the better books on feminism I've read. The chapters on female heroines in books and writing literally run laps on what Jia Tolentino tried in Trick Mirror. What I appreciate so much about this memoir/essay is that it's grounded. Rebecca Solnit grew up in San Francisco and was often the only cishet white person in her early friend groups, and that sense of intersectionality finds itself in her philosophies and ideas. Like yea sure there's a bit of this liberal white woman nonsense (a girl probably doesn't need street names after women to feel seen, or else Vienna would be a feminist utopia) but ultimately there's also a lot of genuinely progressive ideas. A lot of great passages that made me sit and think also, and maybe the only book I could pass off as "meditation". I recommend it.

lilith &
Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit

Reviews

Highlights

Join the club

lilith &Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit

Reviews

Highlights

Join the club

lilith &
Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit