Looking back, she describes how she came to recognize that her own experiences of harassment and menace were inseparable from the systemic problem of who has a voice, or rather who is heard and respected and who is silenced-and how she was galvanized to use her own voice for change. She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer-books themselves the gay community that presented a new model of what else gender, family, and joy could mean and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West.īeyond being a memoir, Solnit's book is also a passionate argument: that women are not just impacted by personal experience, but by membership in a society where violence against women pervades. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher, and of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself. 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. Longlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political WritingĪn 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, from the author of Orwell's Roses All of it has literally arisen from the foundation that is the desktop.” With such reflections, Solnit paints a resonant and moving portrait of how challenging life can be in the female body.Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography Now I wonder if everything I’ve ever written is a counterweight to that attempt to reduce a young woman to nothing. Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence. Even if you weren’t killed, something in you was, your sense of freedom, equality, confidence. All the worst things that happened to other women because they were women could happen to you because you were a woman.

Then she gave me a platform for my voice. Recollections of My Nonexistence Quotes Showing 1-30 of 80.

She writes, for instance, about how she inherited a desk from a woman who was stabbed 15 times by a jealous ex-boyfriend: “Someone tried to silence her. As with the mansplaining essay, Recollections is at its most powerful when she shares personal stories that humanize feminist theory. Solnit’s latest work, Recollections of My Nonexistence, is her first memoir. She has reported on gender inequities for decades and gave birth to the concept of “mansplaining” with a 2008 essay in which she recalled a man condescendingly explaining the finer points of a book to her-a book that Solnit actually wrote herself. Rebecca Solnit has established herself as one of the leading feminist voices in the country.

Recollections of my non existence