PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewFor 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 ... an un-self-centered book that 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 ... The memoir is a tour through the influences that shaped Solnit’s writerly voice ... Solnit typically deploys history in the service of the present, and her memoir is no exception. Recollections of My Nonexistence 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.\' At the same time that she describes her forays into her past, she invites us to connect pieces of her story to our own, as a measure of how far we’ve come and how far we have left to go ... The stochastic nature of social change has been one of Solnit’s guiding concerns, and here it’s transposed to a personal register: How does a person change? We rarely know what something means when it happens to us. We may be finding out for the rest of our lives.
