Recollections of My Nonexistence

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.

The director, writer, and actor Brit Marling said recently, "Part of what keeps you sitting in that chair in that room enduring harassment or abuse from a man in power is that, as a woman, you have rarely seen another end for yourself. In the novels you've read, in the films you've seen, in the stories you've been told since birth, the women so frequently meet disastrous ends."

The mirror in which I saw myself disappear was in the apartment I inhabited for a quarter century, beginning in the last months of my teens. The first several years there were the era of my fiercest battles, some of which I won, some of which left scars I still carry, many of which so formed me that I cannot say I wish that it had all been otherwise, for then I would have been someone else entirely, and she does not exist. I do. But I can wish that the young women who come after me might skip some of the old obstacles, and some of my writing has been toward that end, at least by naming those obstacles.

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Another mirror story: When I was about eleven there was a shoe store where my mother got me the engineer boots I favored back when I was trying not to be that despised thing, a girl, and was trying to be what seemed like a separate thing, rugged, ready for action, but something else made the store memorable. If you stepped in front of the mirrors that l

. . Solnit writes beautifully and with much compassionate nuance about how the threat of violence and not just its execution colors all parts of a woman s life, and how actual physical violence is just one of myriad ways that women are controlled, subjugated and silenced . . . This [book] is electrifying in its precision of thought and language. San Francisco Chronicle

Solnit has valiantly been making the case that misogynist speech and violence are on a spectrum for decades, long before mainstream acceptance of the idea . . . In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Solnit implies that just as the illness can be both dramatic and also cumulative, gradual, and imperceptible, so might be the cure. And things that feel insufficient writing, talking, walking, teaching do in fact represent tiny counterweights, which together shift the course of culture. NPR.org

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. [Recollections] often reverses the figure-ground relationship, portraying the emergence of a writer and her voice from a particular cultural moment and set of fortuitous influences . . . [It] often reads as a letter to young activists and women writers less back in my day and more I fought, and am fighting, the same battles you are. Jenny Odell, The New York Times Book Review

Solnit begins this book of personal and cultural explorations with the memory of looking in a mirror and seeing herself disappear. It s a fitting metaphor for a narrative that is as much a social history as it is a memoir, engaging questions of invisibility and silence and the way patriarchal forces seek to render women small. Los Angeles Times

Solnit emphasizes the need to find poetry in survival . . . [Recollections of My Nonexistence is] a voice raised in hope against gender violence. It s a call we should listen to. The Washington Post

It is a rare writer who has both the intellectual heft and the authority of frontline experience to tackle the most urgent issues of our time. One of the reasons [Solnit] has won so many admirers is the sense that she is driven not by anger but by compassion and the desire to offer encouragement . . . That voice of hope is more essential now than ever, and this memoir is a valuable glimpse into the grit and courage that enabled her to keep telling sidelined stories. The Guardian (London)

Tracking Solnit s coming of age as an artist and feminist in a San Francisco that was changing just as much as she was, this memoir explores Solnit s moral formation and erasure while also acting as a biography of an American city that silences women, still. Courtney Maum, author of The Year of the Horses

A brilliant memoir that is at once both of the moment and timeless . . . Recollections of My Nonexistence is all about liberation. And it invites us to think more broadly about what is possible in challenging times. John Nichols, The Progressive

[A] feat of exacting labor, with places from decades ago remembered in their tiny details alongside a constant, simmering anger at how those same places were ordinary war zones for women. Vanity Fair

A work of feminist solidarity, in which [Solnit] chooses to write not from herself alone, but for and about and often with the voices of other women talking about survival . . . What Solnit wants most is to talk about the obstacles her younger self found . . . She s concerned with the way women disappear, or are encouraged to abdicate their bodies and their vocation . . . [A] meditation on creativity, home, and an elusive self. 4Columns

[A] splendid memoir of longings and determinations, of resistances and revolutions, personal and political, illuminating the kiln in which one of the boldest, most original minds of our time was annealed. Maria Popova, BrainPickings

One of the more beautiful narratives I ve read. Ezra Klein, Vox

Rebecca Solnit s opposition to injustice in its many forms, and her relentless inquiry as a writer and reporter into a great range of issues racial injustice, nuclear weapons, indigenous rights, male hegemony have defined the outrage and politics of much of her generation. In Recollections of My Nonexistence she draws all these potent metaphors for inequity together into a moral stance that transcends the particulars of all her topics. This is a remarkable book smart, brave, edgy, insightful, and authentic. Barry Lopez

One of our foremost thinkers on womanhood explores the journey of her becoming in this deeply personal memoir about her youth in San Francisco. In her searing, sensitive voice, Solnit recalls the epidemic of violence against women . . . tracing her journey as a writer through her journey to speak out on behalf of women. Esquire

Activist and essayist Rebecca Solnit has long captured the discomforts and difficulties of modern womanhood . . . [I]n describing [her youth], she details how she found her voice as an advocate for herself and those around her. Time

Fantastic . . . Solnit generously offers the story of finding her voice exemplary as it is as just one of the tales 'waiting to be told' in feminism s twenty-first century. BUST

This powerful memoir reveals how Solnit s coming-of-age as a journalist and a woman in 1980s San Francisco shaped her as a writer and a feminist. She grapples with sexual harassment, poverty, trauma, and women s exclusion from the cultural conversation, while discovering punk rock and the LGBTQ+ community as safe havens. Her words have long empowered people who feel voiceless, and her latest book is no exception. Good Housekeeping

[Solnit] couches her own lived experience . . . within a larger exploration of contemporary womanhood and an unapologetically feminist, queer lens. While beautifully exercising her own literary voice, Solnit simultaneously poses the question: Who do we allow to characterize the female experience? And what needs to happen in order for that to change? Parade

An inquisitive, perceptive, and original thinker and enthralling writer . . . Solnit has created an unconventional and galvanizing memoir-in-essays that shares key, often terrifying, formative moments in her valiant writing life . . . [and] illuminates with piercing lyricism the body-and-soul dangers women face in our complexly, violently misogynist world . . . [A]n incandescent addition to the literature of dissent and creativity. Booklist (starred)

While misogyny and its effect on women s psyches is familiar territory for Solnit, as in her breakthrough 2014 essay collection, Men Explain Things To Me, here the prolific writer gets more personal than ever as she reflects upon her youth in 1980s San Francisco. AV Club

Absorbing . . . A perceptive, radiant portrait of a writer of indelible consequence. Kirkus Reviews (starred)

An engaging look at Solnit s life, which succeeds in giving voice to inequity caused by patriarchy . . . Her recollection of her feelings regarding violence and being silenced are particularly resonant . . . She knows who she is and which forces have shaped her . . . [and] realizes the power of naming inequity, violence, and oppression against women. Library Journal

Enlightening . . . a thinking person s book about writing, female identity, and freedom by a powerful and motivating voice for change. Publishers Weekly