Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit’s most personal memoir to date, is a lyrical love letter to girls, to young women and their dreams. It is also a prayer, a manifesto of solidarity to the women those girls became or will become, a song to sing in choir their regrets. It is, also, a poetic warning cry to what awaits if they are to insist on having a voice and the power to decide over their lives ... historical movements in one direction or another, seen from the point of view of the outsider turned insider, that provide the third element making this a great book, the fascinating what of the book, the most heartbreaking moments, the most staggering truths about what it means to be a have-not in the land of the privileged ... Recollections of My Nonexistence is, evenly, from beginning to end, as deliciously readable as Men Explain Thing to Me and The Faraway Nearby, Solnit’s previous critically acclaimed bestsellers, but here it is this lyrical—but also clear, well-researched, impactful—articulation of womanhood that makes it required, urgent, reading for women of all ages, and for men, all men, even more so.
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 ... 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.
Anyone hoping that this book, which is billed as a memoir, will offer a more intimate glimpse of the writer, might be disappointed in that regard; Solnit does not go in for soul-baring, and even in this personal history she keeps her gaze focused outward, on what her particular encounters can tell us about the prevailing culture of publishing, or the art world, or the environmental movement, or the city at the time ... at times Recollections does cover ground traversed in previous essay collections, most obviously as it catches up with her present work. But 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 she 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 when the forces opposing her seemed monolithic.
Solnit writes vividly of her influences, from the thick atmosphere of gendered violence and discrimination to the open landscapes of the American West, where she house-sits in New Mexico, researches and hikes alone. She captures her tiny 'alabaster' studio so vividly that you can close your eyes and be there, running a hand along the haunch of the velvet sofa ... Readers are offered snippets of a life—often in rich tones—but do we come away with a better sense of who is Rebecca Solnit, the person? Not really ... There is a sense of reserve that feels deliberate even as it is unsatisfying. Solnit obeys the conventions of the memoir genre sparingly ... Solnit reflects beautifully on the intricacies of [her first San Francisco] neighborhood at large, writing one of the most vivid sections of the book. Yet when she moves years later, she leaves a gentrified, white middle-class area that bears little resemblance to the Lyon Street of 1981, she has little to say about it ... rather than lingering solely on despair, Solnit pivots toward hope ... Her book then, might be read less as memoir than as manifesto—a voice raised in hope against gender violence.
In examining the intersections where power meets race, gender and sexuality, she obtains a clearer view of misogyny. She is especially eloquent on the mechanisms of what we’ve come to call gaslighting ... By continually emphasizing that the focus should not be on her individual stories but rather on the ubiquity of these experiences, Solnit rejects the idea that hers is a story of personal triumph. Instead, she locates power in solidarity ... Solnit’s memoir is suffused with such moments, in which reading and bearing witness bring further understanding. But does an acknowledgment of shared pain absolve one of personal responsibility? Even someone as aware as Solnit reveals gaps in her own empathy, blind spots that prevent her from reckoning with her own responsibility ... Recollections of my Nonexistence is a powerful examination of the way small moments can accumulate in a brilliant mind to formulate big ideas and even help conceive a better world.
Strangely, given her reputation as a polemicist, she seems to avoid resolution; many of her chapters end on unshowy, almost awkward lines. This quality speaks to a tension in her work—the extent to which her political activism is subsumed by her diffuse, lyrical sensibility. In fact, Solnit can be most persuasive not when dispensing feminist credos but when she is studying the fine grain of intimate experience .
The memoir...feels perhaps too familiar, a book so focused on existing conversations, so tightly structured around relatable insights, that it feels—dare I say it—designed to do little more than resonate online ... One of the strengths of the book is the way Solnit manages to think through nonexistence as both a weapon and a shield ... Recollections of My Nonexistence is often closer to a work of cultural criticism than memoir—though in combining the two, it asks us to think about how much our sense of self-worth and social value is shaped by the cues we get from films, books, and television ... It is hard to disagree with anything Solnit says here, but one wonders if that is a shortcoming ... I kept waiting for this book to spin out more, to think, for instance, about how nonexistence functions under capitalism through the erasure of women’s labor, or what it means when women become not invisible but indeed hypervisible as justifications for military intervention ... There is a distinct lack of politics as policy here, perhaps because a truly feminist political vision might make some of Solnit’s white and upper-middle-class readers uncomfortable.
Many of the arguments in Recollections of My Nonexistence might feel familiar or even obvious, which is due in part to Solnit's own influence in the last few years ... Here, Solnit describes the threat of sexual violence as a kind of atmospheric phenomenon, an accumulated weight of episodes and images rather than a particular threat. This gives the book a kind of mistiness, although you can see why Solnit might tire of litigating particular misogynistic incidents, even when they reveal a broader pattern. After all, if a listener is unconvinced, any example can be argued away as an aberration, an exception, and not indicative of a wider culture ... 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.
... not a tell-all ... what many of us might think of as the anchoring details of a life only flicker into shape, indistinct as shadows on a wall ... Recollections of My Non-Existence, in tackling the silencing of women’s voices, finally supplies the personal story that lies behind the highly politicised, feminist essays she’s been writing over the past few years ... This is a book that goes to dark places, but it also cherishes the people who have helped Solnit on her way: in particular, queer culture ... both the story of where we’ve been and a celebration of how far we’ve come.
Perhaps it’s because I’m a direct contemporary of hers, but so much of what Solnit describes here resonates with me for its pitch-perfect description of what I believe so many of us experienced as young women ... What is perhaps most revelatory in Solnit’s observations — briefly considered in the 2008 essay, more widely explored here in Recollections — is her insight that the treatment of women is on a continuum that moves easily from silencing to battering to raping to murdering. Society treats them all as unrelated phenomena, one-off incidents indicative of nothing in particular...Solnit makes a powerful argument to the contrary.
Out of force of habit, perhaps, the book is more essayistic than biographical. While memoirists are often criticised for navel gazing, Solnit is more at ease depicting exterior landscapes. She paints a picture of a gentrifying San Francisco in broad strokes ... Solnit reiterates her confidence that culture can shape politics, pointing to the evolution in equal rights that she has witnessed in her lifetime.
... tangential, changeable, deeply feminist, and imbued with a sense of hope that undercuts her wild anger at the world’s injustices. It says much for how quickly our thinking about women’s rights and those of minorities has evolved recently that her feminist rhetoric almost feels dated at points. However, Solnit’s energy is still fresh, urgent, and vital, reminding the reader that although the battle seems to be on the way to being won by powers of good, we are still far from victory ... The facts of her life are there, but they are almost coincidental to other narratives and other lives. She brings space (San Francisco, the great American West) and time in for a moment, then releases them again, creating a non-linearity and a diffuse narrative that is never confusing ... a wonderful book in that, without ever really explicitly saying so, its writer is aware that Solnit’s voice, like every voice speaking against the hegemony, is important, that any resistance to received, conservative thought is something to be celebrated. The aggregate of all of the small voices effects change, beautifully demonstrated in an autobiography that speaks more of the collective than of the self.
... refreshingly unconventional ... fluctuates, squirms and coils its way through nine wonderfully unpredictable chapters, each comprised of several sub-sections, like the movements of a musical sonata ... anything but a smooth chronological account of how one of America’s most respected truth-to-power voices found her stride as a writer of substance ... Like a masterful composer or orchestrator, [Solnit] draws from a broad literary toolbox ranging from tight journalism to poetic wonderment, giving her prose a personal yet universal character ... So while Solnit reflects very closely at times on her physical presence in the world, Recollections of My Nonexistence offers surprisingly little in terms of intimate or deeply personal detail. Just as surprisingly, one doesn’t miss this layer of self-expression, which in many memoirs tends to become annoying self-absorption ... Instead, Solnit is most engaging when she connects with some of the many social currents flowing through her life as she researched, interacted with and reacted to the often grueling process of researching, writing and getting her against-the-grain work published ... What is different about Recollections of My Nonexistence is its cumulative atmosphere of becoming, through which Solnit reflects on claiming, little by little, who she was meant to be. So instead of ending as a finished and definitive work, this memoir reaches a pause-point where the achievement of social change for so many of the people whose plight filled Solnit’s heart has been real. While not quite enough (and it may never be enough), here we are all meant to breathe deeply, gather strength, ignore all the gaslighting voices and soldier on.
In this new book, Solnit is more concerned with memoir than with argument per se, though this never curtails her expansive, connective vision ... This careful balancing, and this subtle exploration of the mutability of personality, identity, and selfhood, characterises this memoir ... The first two chapters capture beautifully the precarity of youth, and the exhausting but liberating job of creating the self and imagining a future for it ... It is this galvanising prose, coupled with Solnit’s personal experience, that give this book its brightest and most effective moments. Though Recollections of My Non-Existence doesn’t have the same sort of focused exposition we find in Solnit’s other book-length works, its lifelong scope allows for change and development. Offering a deeply-considered exploration of consciousness and the mutability of selfhood, this memoir is generous in the breadth of its ideas, and generative in the clarity of its arguments.
... while the book is full of short vignettes, it could be argued it contains almost no stories. In this way, it is an unusual memoir, less life story, more story of an intellectual evolution. It is, at its core, a deeply intimate and deeply internal book about how Solnit became one of the defining feminist thinkers of the 21st century ... 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 ... a best-of album, covering feminism, environmentalism, urbanism, human rights and the ways in which all these things intersect. Solnit is deliberate, poetic and formidable. She’s even, on occasion, funny ... The chapters and sections often read like stand-alone essays, but there is a pleasure in the chronology, even if it’s not exactly linear. Although we learn very little about her personal life, the book is deeply personal ... Sometimes this feels like sitting beside her while she’s at her desk or walking the streets of San Francisco while she muses on the development of her feminist consciousness. At its best, this is electrifying in its precision of thought and language. At its worst, it’s, well, like being on a long walk with someone who feels almost constantly attacked ... For those of us who knew the ’80s, it’s an exhilarating reminder, and it helps explain how she arrived in our troubled present with her insistence on hope intact.
Solnit has gracefully aged out of any mere fist-shaking into a voice predicated more on holding direct eye contact with the guilty ... Her lifelong consideration of landscape is evident in the way her sentences stretch out ... She doesn't simply give an example; she reworks it three or four times within the course of a single sentence, expansively and specifically homing in on a given thread ... Solnit's ability to capture the pathos of girlhood, to articulate the emotional landscape that women construct in order to survive and then possibly to thrive, keeps the focus where it belongs: on what we really do have in common ... Recollections of My Nonexistence does a terrific job of sharing her insight into how the struggle gets done, and anyone interested in the obliteration of patriarchy would do well to get acquainted with who Solnit is now. The surprising amount of peace of mind this book induces is, if I am not mistaken, a delicious and hard-earned symptom of hope.
Solnit’s new book is a work of feminist solidarity, in which she chooses to write not from herself alone, but 'for and about and often with the voices of other women talking about survival.' Sliding frequently from the personal into the general, in a sense she’s found a new way to leave herself out. This frustrates some of the ordinary pleasures of memoir: the personal drama and psychological insight of The Faraway Nearby aren’t here. Yet as Solnit pushes the boundaries of the genre, she shows that it’s wide enough to contain at one end the willful oversharing of Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, and at another this cool meditation on creativity, home, and an elusive self ... Solnit’s refusal to be separated from others can be limiting: the polemicist sometimes gets in the storyteller’s way. But that she’s like other women is also what she needs to tell us—because it’s a new source of strength for her, and because it’s true.
Although she communicates a palpable longing for her years of apprenticeship, during which she had time and space to grow, the way Solnit expresses her nostalgia often feels unproductively sentimental. What’s strange about the book, given her reputation as a deft and fearless miner of her own experience, is the way it seems to lack any exploration of ambivalence; Solnit gives us a complete, picture-perfect vision of her development as an artist, one that moves smoothly from one period to the next. There’s no sense of her exploring her own ideas in the moment; we aren’t given the conflicts of youth coming to understand itself and its own contradictions. Instead, the finished product of Solnit today—a celebrity feminist—seems to be reading back into her past a cohesiveness that couldn’t, or at least shouldn’t, have been there at the time ... What Solnit gives us is ultimately a thin, singular vision of her past, one that does not adequately address the complicated intersections between power, race, gender, and sexuality one would expect her to grasp intuitively, because she doesn't give us an exploration of a larger community beyond her own identity.
Her recollection of her feelings regarding violence and being silenced are particularly resonant ... Despite such heavy subject matter, Solnit's passion for reading and writing shines through. Her tone is authoritative, but reassuring ... An engaging look at Solnit's life, which succeeds in giving voice to inequity caused by patriarchy. Recommended for memoir aficionados, especially feminist audience.
Solnit has created an unconventional and galvanizing memoir-in-essays that shares key, often terrifying, formative moments in her valiant writing life ... She...illuminates with piercing lyricism the body-and-soul dangers women face in our complexly, violently misogynist world ... This is an incandescent addition to the literature of dissent and creativity.
... [an] enlightening, nonlinear memoir ... In fluid, vivid prose, she recalls the terror she experienced while walking the streets alone, not knowing if she’d be attacked ... This is a thinking person’s book about writing, female identity, and freedom by a powerful and motivating voice for change.
