• Rebecca Solnit Books
• Rebecca Solnit Book Tour

Itis often said of the writer Rebecca Solnit that her work “resonates.” It’s hardto find an article about her that doesn’t include that word. At a time whenfeminism is about finding others who have lived on the same frequency (#metoo,#yesallwomen), a thinker like Solnit, who gravitates toward identifying commondenominators in the female experience (mansplaining, gaslighting, silencing,etc.) is primed to resonate.

Nowhereis resonance better measured than on social media, where Solnit’s work is sharedand circulated expeditiously. On her Facebook page, which has over 150,000followers, she shares news articles, political commentary, and posts that readlike magazine essays; it has become an online community unto itself forfeminists looking for digital platforms to express rage, hope, and everythingin between. That her work feels tailor-made for the kind of collectiveexperience social media enables is no coincidence. Solnit’s rise to new levelsof fame stems from one of her essays, “MenExplain Things to Me,” going viral online. (She had in fact publishednearly a dozen books by the time that essay appeared.) The piece, writtenoriginally for the Los Angeles Times, popularized the word mansplaining, a term that accomplished the rare feat of articulating a familiar butas-yet-unrecognized experience.

Apr 20, 2021 In her memoir, 'Recollections of my Nonexistence,' feminist writer Rebecca Solnit noted that, when you are a woman, 'everyone is free to judge you.' And it's almost impossible to live up to our. In her memoir, 'Recollections of my Nonexistence,' feminist writer Rebecca Solnit noted that, when you are a woman, 'everyone is free to judge you.' And it's almost impossible to live up to our.

Solnit’snew book,Recollections of My Nonexistence, takes us to her formative years, when she was experiencingpatterns of misogyny she could not name (and, as she explains, therefore could notfight). “I was often unaware of what and why I was resisting,” she reflects,“and so my defiance was murky, incoherent, erratic.” She came to see this condition,and that of all women, as a kind of imperative toward nonexistence. The book,a memoir and creative autobiography, is meant as an antidote, a guide toavoiding self-effacement in a world where women are routinely disappeared andquieted down. “I can wish that the young woman who came after me might skipsome of the old obstacles,” she writes, “and some of my writing has been towardthat end, at least by naming these obstacles.”

Thememoir revisits many of the concepts—mansplaining, gaslighting, streetharassment, the transformative power of women’s stories—that appear both inSolnit’s previous work and in the online feminist ecosystem that has supportedit. The result feels perhaps too familiar, a book so focused on existingconversations, so tightly structured around relatable insights, that it feels—dareI say it—designed to do little more than resonate online.

Solnit grew up in a troubled household in a suburbof San Francisco. After a brief stint in Paris as a teenager, she returned to northernCalifornia where she took the GED at 15 and graduated from San Francisco StateUniversity in 1981 at age 20. The year before, she moved into an apartment in apredominately African American neighborhood near the city’s Panhandle district. “Later on I’d come to understand gentrification and the role that I likelyplayed as a pale face making the neighborhood more palatable to other palefaces,” she writes, “but I had no sense at the start that things would changeand how that worked.” Solnit would spend the next two decades in this studioapartment, writing near her bay window on a desk gifted to her by a friend whowas nearly stabbed to death by an ex-boyfriend. “Now I wonder,” she reflects, “ifeverything I have ever written is a counterweight to that attempt to reduce ayoung woman to nothing.”

Oneof the strengths of the book is the way Solnit manages to think throughnonexistence as both a weapon and a shield. In an early chapter, she writesabout how she learned the “art of nonexistence” as a young teenager, trying toavoid the gaze of older men, including some in her own family. “At twelve andthirteen and fourteen and fifteen, I had been pursued and pressured for sex byadult men on the edge of my familial and social circles.” Throughout heradolescence and young adulthood, Solnit begins looking for ways to exist as littleas possible, from turning thin to the point of frailty to becoming constantlyaware of exits and escapes: “I became expert at fading and slipping andsneaking away, backing off, squirming out of tight situations … at graduallydisengaging, or suddenly absenting myself.” Solnit often writes about herdecision to become a writer as a desire to name the various violences thatchased her. It is also possible that the life of an author—tucked away inarchives, working quietly in writing nooks—presented a way to live a lifephysically out of view.

Nonexistencecan also be literal for Solnit, as the chapter “Annihilators” makes clear. The1970s and 1980s saw a spike in the number of serial killers, leading to ageneral sense of anxiety across the country, one most keenly felt by youngwomen who were their primary targets. “It was the era” Solnit explains “of theNight Stalker and the middle-aged white man known as the Trailside Killer (whoraped and killed women hikers on the trails I hiked on) and the Pillow-caseRapist and the Beauty Queen Killer and the Green River Killer and the Ski MaskRapist and many other men who rampaged up and down the Pacific Coast withoutnicknames.” Solnit recalls a harrowing story of walking home following a NewYear’s Party and being followed closely by a man on a dark, empty street. Whileshe ultimately finds her way out of the situation, the trauma stays with her;it is one of the most detailed and specific memories that Solnit recalls fromthis period in her life.

Solnitis especially attuned to the normalization of violence against women in popularculture and belles lettres. In this way, Recollections of My Nonexistenceis often closer to a work of cultural criticism than memoir—though in combiningthe two, it asks us to think about how much our sense of self-worth and socialvalue is shaped by the cues we get from films, books, and television. “In thearts,” she notes, “the torture and death of a beautiful woman or a young womanor both was forever being portrayed as erotic, exciting, satisfying.” Shealludes to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma, and David Lynch,directors whose signature works centered on murdered women (Psycho, Twin Peaks, etc.): “Legions of women were being killed in movies,in songs, in novels, and in the world, and each death was a little wound, alittle weight, a little message that it could have been me.” For Solnit, the aestheticizationof these stories amounts to a kind of delegitimization of the very real fearsshe harbored at the time about her safety. It “was a kind of collective gaslighting” shewrites, tantamount to “[living] in a war that no one around me wouldacknowledge as a war.”

Itis hard to disagree with anything Solnit says here, but one wonders if that isa shortcoming. Though Solnit makes references, largely in asides, to the wayswomen’s experiences are complicated by race, class, and sexual orientation,there is little real mining of these disjunctures. In Recollections of MyNonexistence, women and minorities largely exist as innocent, interestingfigures who add “vitality” to spaces, who fit neatly into Solnit’s worldviewwherein misogyny is largely a thing that straight white men (and Kanye West)do.

When resonance is treated as anethos in and of itself, we begin to silence ourselves, and solidarity becomeslittle more than a new kind of nonexistence.

Shepasses by black churches and revels in the idea that she is “never too far fromdevotion,” but does not consider the potential collision of Christian modestywith feminist ideas about sexual liberation. She writes that she likes livingin California because it “faces Asia” but does not engage with the uniquecontours of Pacific feminism. The gay men in the Castro make great friends forSolnit—“Oh, how I was free to be funny or dramatic or preposterous aroundthem,” she exclaims—but the capacity of queer men to enact misogyny is neverexplored.

A few years ago, Viviane Fairbank of The Walruswrote a piece titled“Why I Don’t Read Rebecca Solnit,” that articulated some of the same anxietiesI hold about Solnit’s relatively unquestioned status as an important voice incontemporary feminism. For Fairbank, Solnit’s writing embodies a new, watered-downethos of feminist solidarity, “call it ‘pop feminism,’—that addresses onlytopics we can safely agree on.” Fairbank traces Solnit’s belief in the power ofwomen’s stories to the consciousness-raising work of 1960s feminists, remindingus that these stories were meant to lead to “debate thattriggers policy change, social reform, or even popular demonstrations. Solnitnever makes it past anecdotal evidence.” Likewise, I kept waiting for this bookto spin out more, to think, for instance, about how nonexistence functions undercapitalism through the erasure of women’s labor, or what it means when womenbecome not invisible but indeed hypervisible as justifications for militaryintervention (i.e., the U.S. government’s insistence that its invasion would“liberate” Afghan women).

While Solnit has written extensivelyelsewhere on climate and anti-nuclear activism, those issues often recede intothe background in Recollectionsof My Nonexistence. Thereis a distinct lack of politics as policy here, perhaps because a truly feministpolitical vision might make some of Solnit’s white and upper-middle-classreaders uncomfortable. But that is what happens when resonance is treated as anethos in and of itself; we begin to silence ourselves, and solidarity becomeslittle more than a new kind of nonexistence.

Rebecca Solnit Books

Rebecca Solnit Book Tour

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