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, and of
the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in
which she transformed herself. 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.
Beyond 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. 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.