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68
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
74/100Critics
44/100Scholars
87/100Author:
Rebecca Solnit
Publisher:
Viking
Date:
March 10, 2020
The sui generis author of Men Explain Things to Me describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco in an atmosphere of gender violence and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas.
What The Reviewers Say
Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit’s most personal memoir to date, is a lyrical love letter to girls, to young women and their dreams. It is also a prayer, a manifesto of solidarity to the women those girls became or will become, a song to sing in choir their regrets. It is, also, a poetic warning cry to what awaits if they are to insist on having a voice and the power to decide over their lives.
For Solnit fans, her new memoir is a glimpse of all that was 'taking form out of sight,' providing a key to understanding much of her work to date. Yet simply as a coming-of-age narrative, it also has much to offer someone new to her writing.
Anyone hoping that this book, which is billed as a memoir, will offer a more intimate glimpse of the writer, might be disappointed in that regard; Solnit does not go in for soul-baring, and even in this personal history she keeps her gaze focused outward, on what her particular encounters can tell us about the prevailing culture of publishing, or the art world, or the environmental movement, or the city at the time.
Solnit writes vividly of her influences, from the thick atmosphere of gendered violence and discrimination to the open landscapes of the American West, where she house-sits in New Mexico, researches and hikes alone. She captures her tiny 'alabaster' studio so vividly that you can close your eyes and be there, running a hand along the haunch of the velvet sofa.
