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.

In examining the intersections where power meets race, gender and sexuality, she obtains a clearer view of misogyny. She is especially eloquent on the mechanisms of what we’ve come to call gaslighting.

Strangely, given her reputation as a polemicist, she seems to avoid resolution; many of her chapters end on unshowy, almost awkward lines. This quality speaks to a tension in her work—the extent to which her political activism is subsumed by her diffuse, lyrical sensibility. In fact, Solnit can be most persuasive not when dispensing feminist credos but when she is studying the fine grain of intimate experience ..

The memoir...feels perhaps too familiar, a book so focused on existing conversations, so tightly structured around relatable insights, that it feels—dare I say it—designed to do little more than resonate online.

Many of the arguments in Recollections of My Nonexistence might feel familiar or even obvious, which is due in part to Solnit's own influence in the last few years.

... not a tell-all.

Perhaps it’s because I’m a direct contemporary of hers, but so much of what Solnit describes here resonates with me for its pitch-perfect description of what I believe so many of us experienced as young women.

Out of force of habit, perhaps, the book is more essayistic than biographical. While memoirists are often criticised for navel gazing, Solnit is more at ease depicting exterior landscapes. She paints a picture of a gentrifying San Francisco in broad strokes.

... tangential, changeable, deeply feminist, and imbued with a sense of hope that undercuts her wild anger at the world’s injustices. It says much for how quickly our thinking about women’s rights and those of minorities has evolved recently that her feminist rhetoric almost feels dated at points. However, Solnit’s energy is still fresh, urgent, and vital, reminding the reader that although the battle seems to be on the way to being won by powers of good, we are still far from victory.

... refreshingly unconventional.

In this new book, Solnit is more concerned with memoir than with argument per se, though this never curtails her expansive, connective vision.

... while the book is full of short vignettes, it could be argued it contains almost no stories. In this way, it is an unusual memoir, less life story, more story of an intellectual evolution. It is, at its core, a deeply intimate and deeply internal book about how Solnit became one of the defining feminist thinkers of the 21st century.

Solnit has gracefully aged out of any mere fist-shaking into a voice predicated more on holding direct eye contact with the guilty.

Solnit’s new book is a work of feminist solidarity, in which she chooses to write not from herself alone, but 'for and about and often with the voices of other women talking about survival.' Sliding frequently from the personal into the general, in a sense she’s found a new way to leave herself out. This frustrates some of the ordinary pleasures of memoir: the personal drama and psychological insight of The Faraway Nearby aren’t here. Yet as Solnit pushes the boundaries of the genre, she shows that it’s wide enough to contain at one end the willful oversharing of Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, and at another this cool meditation on creativity, home, and an elusive self.

Although she communicates a palpable longing for her years of apprenticeship, during which she had time and space to grow, the way Solnit expresses her nostalgia often feels unproductively sentimental. What’s strange about the book, given her reputation as a deft and fearless miner of her own experience, is the way it seems to lack any exploration of ambivalence; Solnit gives us a complete, picture-perfect vision of her development as an artist, one that moves smoothly from one period to the next. There’s no sense of her exploring her own ideas in the moment; we aren’t given the conflicts of youth coming to understand itself and its own contradictions. Instead, the finished product of Solnit today—a celebrity feminist—seems to be reading back into her past a cohesiveness that couldn’t, or at least shouldn’t, have been there at the time.

Her recollection of her feelings regarding violence and being silenced are particularly resonant.

Solnit has created an unconventional and galvanizing memoir-in-essays that shares key, often terrifying, formative moments in her valiant writing life.

... [an] enlightening, nonlinear memoir.

... [an] absorbing new memoir.