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Cover of Recollections of My Nonexistence

Recollections of My Nonexistence

A Memoir

Rebecca Solnit

256 pages

A lyrical, fiercely intelligent exploration of finding your voice and taking up space in a world designed to silence you.

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What it feels like

Reading this memoir feels like taking a long, associative walk through a foggy, shadowed city with a fiercely intelligent friend. The pace is meandering and deeply contemplative, allowing the reader to sit inside an atmosphere that is at once heavy with the ambient threat of misogyny and bright with the defiant spark of artistic awakening. The prose is signature Solnit: lyrical, expansive, and weaving seamlessly between intimate personal memory and sharp cultural critique. It is a book that moves from the claustrophobia of being silenced to the wide-open landscapes of self-discovery and liberation. It will deeply satisfy readers who love feminist essays, psychogeography, and memoirs that treat the development of a writer's mind as a profound act of rebellion.

Mood
  • atmospheric
  • shadowed
  • defiant
  • expansive
Tone
  • contemplative
  • fierce
  • intellectual
  • lyrical
Pace
meandering
Themes
finding one's voice · systemic misogyny · artistic awakening · the power of place · threat of violence
The writing
The prose is lyrical, associative, and deeply intellectual, weaving personal memory with sharp cultural critique in flowing, essayistic sentences.
The arc
The journey moves from a state of vulnerable near-erasure in a hostile world to a grounded, expansive sense of artistic and personal liberation.
Who it's for
This is for readers who crave feminist memoirs that blend intimate personal history with sweeping, psychogeographical social commentary.
Content notes
  • gender-based violence
  • misogyny
  • threat of assault
  • trauma

About the book

"In this memoir, celebrated author, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit relates how she found her voice as a writer and as a feminist during the 1980s in San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. Then in her early twenties, Solnit tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city, which became her great teacher; of the small apartment she found, which became a home in which to metamorphosize; of how punk rock gave form and voice to her own fury and explosive energy. Solnit explores the way some men attempted to erase her, to shut her up, keep her out and challenge her credibility, as well as contemplating other kinds of nonexistence of groups for gender, ethnicity, and orientation. Her book ends with what liberated her as a person and as a writer--books themselves, the gay men and community who presented a new model of what else gender, family, and celebration could be, and her awakening to the spacious landscapes of the American west, which taught her how to write in the way she has ever since. Recollections of My Nonexistence connects Solnit's hugely popular polemical feminist writings of the last decade with the more lyrical, personal writing of her beloved earlier books A Field Guide to Getting Lost and The Faraway Nearby. This book is for everyone who has endured erasure and dismissal while coming of age in male-dominated spaces"--

Description from Open Library.

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