Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir by Rebecca Solnit

Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir Reviews

• 
  Orsodimondo

  MEMORIA DI RAGAZZA
  
  
  
  Memoria di ragazza, e di giovane donna. Memoria di un essere umano che si va formando, e di come cambia il mondo insieme e intorno a lei.
  Gran bel viaggio, gran bella scoperta, gran bel primo incontro.
  
  Il cambiamento è l’unità di misura del tempo, e io ho capito che per accorgersi del cambiamento bisogna andare a un ritmo più lento di lui; vivendo un quarto di secolo nello stesso posto ci sono riuscita.
  
  
  
  Rebecca Solnit racconta la sua vita, il suo percorso esistenziale, la sua crescita. Un po’ come si trattasse di una pianta, un albero che s’innalza ed estende tutt’intorno sempre più.
  Racconta dettagli più che fatti, episodi più che storie.
  Per farlo, insieme, racconta il cambiamento del luogo in cui ha vissuto.
  E siccome quel luogo è la città che più amo al mondo insieme a quella dove abito, e siccome il periodo che racconta sono gli anni in cui anch’io abitavo in quella città, in un altro quartiere, ma non poi così lontano – e poi in fondo la mia prima casa era vicino alla zona dove abitava lei, era una così:
  Le splendide case di legno erano state costruite a fine Ottocento e inizio Novecento senza lesinare tutto l’armamentario ornamentale dell’epoca: bovindi, colonne, ringhiere tornite, modanature, spesso a motivi vegetali, coppi a scaglia di pesce, portici sorretti da arcate, torrette, persino cupole a bulbo.
  Ecco, per questi motivi leggere i Ricordi della mia inesistenza è stato un lento intenso piacere che vorrei non mi lasciasse più.
  
  
  
  Man mano il racconto sembra abbandonare la trasformazione urbanistica per orientarsi più sull’aspetto sociale, e poi via via sempre più su quello biografico.
  Con lo scorrere delle pagine il racconto di Rebecca Solnit diventa sempre più personale. Ma siccome la sua vita è parte di un tutto, e di quel tutto, o meglio, a determinati aspetti di quel tutto lei si è sempre più dedicata, si segue anche il cambiamento del paese e del paesaggio americano: ambientalismo, proteste antinucleare, movimenti pacifisti. E prima e dopo e intorno a tutto, l’essere donna: cosa significa, cosa determina, cosa implica. Femminismo, sì, certo:
  La condizione delle donne e l’atto dello scrivere sono i temi centrali di questo reportage di un’iniziazione all’esistenza nella quale il declinarsi al femminile non equivale mai al cancellarsi o al subire.
  
  
  
  Il suo percorso di scrittrice. Scrittrice di giornalismo, di ricerca, di storia, di reportage, di saggistica, di analisi, di commento e critica. Partendo da quel suo primo minuscolo appartamento vissuto come “una stanza tutta per sé" – il riferimento a Virginia Woolf è tutto meno che casuale.
  Reagan aveva appena preso il posto di Carter, e molte cose stavano per cambiare, nella direzione di un inasprimento della cultura misogina e sessista. Se non fosse che intorno altro era e stava ancora di più per cambiare: il movimento e le istanze femministe, appunto. Ma anche quelle gay, e nere, e ambientaliste, e… in una direzione che dovrebbe sempre più spezzare quel dogma racchiuso nel titolo del suo libro più famoso, Gli uomini mi spiegano le cose.
  Privato e pubblico procedono meravigliosamente a braccetto nella vita di questa scrittrice, di questa donna da non dimenticare.
  
  
  
  Su e giù per le strade di San Francisco, e per quelle della California, dell’Ovest americano, a piedi (Storia del camminare è un altro dei suoi libri più celebri) e in macchina, attraverso deserti e aree impiegate per esperimenti atomici, attraverso la devastazione dell’AIDS, via dalla famiglia d’origine dominata da un padre repressivo e forse anche violento, collezionando violenze e molestie, quelle che si fanno alle donne, i primi esseri umani che si vogliono mettere a tacere (da qui l’uso del termine “inesistenza”), così come le cosiddette “minoranze”, che sono tali solo finché le si reprime e punisce e calpesta.
  Ciò che volevo sopra ogni cosa era la trasformazione, non della mia indole ma della mia condizione.
  
  Muovendosi e procedendo con e dentro la Storia.
  Un magnifico, pregnante, emozionante memoir.
  
  
  
  Ci sono stati cambiamenti epocali che hanno reso i tempi della mia giovinezza una terra straniera in cui non vivo più, che i giovani non visiteranno mai e di cui non sapranno mai quanto fosse diversa e perché le cose siano cambiate e chi ringraziare per questo. Anche la mia si trasformò grazie a passaggi che avrei riconosciuto solo rivolgendo lo sguardo all’indietro.
  
  
• 
  Michael

  Contemplative and mesmerizing, Recollections of My Nonexistence thoughtfully charts the famous essayist’s coming of age as a thinker, activist, and writer. In lucid prose Solnit recounts how, in her late teens, she left her suburban Californian home lonely and silenced for the promise of a vibrant life as a woman artist in San Francisco, embarking upon a decades-long quest to write books, join intentional communities, and inspire political change. Across eight chapters, each moving at a deliberate pace, Solnit drifts from recollection to recollection of what it felt like to grow into white womanhood navigating a culture of sexism and racism at a time when political and cultural change seemed a distant dream. Along the way she seamlessly embeds the social history of San Francisco and the American West into her account of her own life.
• 
  Diane S ☔

  Solnit is an author I have meant to read for quite a while. I have another book of hers somewhere around here, that I received in one of my book boxes. I, now regret waited so long as she is a fabulous writer, essayist.
  
  She writes about the apartment in San Fransisco that she lived in for a decade. A beautiful apartment in San Francisco in an all black neighborhood, a neighborhood that was full of life. As in all the essays in this book, she than turns way from herself and talks about all the people, cultures that have been misplaced. Either for money, or ventures that will make money or just because someone else wanted what someone else already had. Again, the haves and have nots.
  
  She talks about violence against women, men who think they have the right to a women's body. Expectations on how bodies should look to appeal to men, of to feel good about oneself. Socities expectations. Her own brushes with violence and again she turns away from her own story to tell of violence against other women. As well as historical bias against women victims of crime.
  
  Books and what they mean to her. Her writing life and so much more. Elegantly and gracefully written. Her words just flowed. Yes, I was impressed and once I can put my hands on that book that is somewhere on some pile, I fully intend to dive in.
  
  ARc from Edelweiss.
• 
  Roman Clodia

  One of the iconic stories in Ovid's Metamorphoses is the terrible tale of Philomela, raped by her brother-in-law and then silenced by him hacking out her tongue so that she can't accuse him or speak out about her ordeal. It's this classic intertwining of violence against women and the muting of female voices which drives Solnit's memoir.
  
  Don't come to this expecting anything like a conventional autobiography: Solnit retains a sense of privacy with regard to her personal life. Instead this is a kind of biography of her voice, how she moves from a young woman harassed on the streets of 1980s San Francisco and aware of violence against women all around her to the advocate, essayist and outspoken feminist writer she is today.
  
  Solnit may not be a supreme stylist but she is intelligent, honest, compassionate and empathetic: she has that ability to reach out via her words, to move from the individual to a voice for other women, but without appropriating others' experiences as her own. She can be funny, too, not least when recounting how she came to write her classic essay 'Men Explain Things To Me'.
  
  Sharp but accessible, thoughtful, committed - a must-read for Solnit groupies and those new to her writing.
  
  Many thanks to Granta for an ARC via NetGalley.
• 
  Anna

  Chyba moja ulubiona Solnit.
• 
  Megan Bell

  Readers like me who, over Rebecca Solnit’s thirty years of writing, have fallen in love with her seismic, world-shifting essays will not be disappointed in this memoir, her first longform writing in seven years. True to her form, this is a memoir not necessarily of the events of Solnit’s coming of age, but rather the greater influences in her development as a feminist, an activist, and a writer in 1980s San Francisco. In these pages, Solnit describes the formation of her own powerful voice while interrogating the culture that routinely silences women through violence and disregard. By sharing these formative years, Solnit is sure to inspire and vindicate generations of women and offer much-needed encouragement to people of all genders to invest in voices long suppressed.
• 
  Marc

  Yes, Rebecca Solnit is a radical feminist, this book, 'a memoir', confirms that once again. At first I found it strange that someone of barely 60 years old writes a kind of memoir. Apparently, she felt compelled to outline the background to her controversial essay
  Men Explain Things to Me, with which she suddenly became known worldwide in 2013, and which would help lay the foundation of the #MeToo-movement.
  
  Solnit describes in detail how, from her adolescence, she became sensitive to the harassment of women by men when she came to live in the metropolitan city of San Francisco. She speaks of a kind of permanent war, and that is hard to swallow as a male reader. But when you read her overview of the way in which (some) women are treated by (some) men, and the psychological (if not fysical) harm does to the victims, it actually seems justified. And because this pattern already exists for decades, centuries, millennia..., women have come to see the world through this predicament: “you depend on men, and what they think of you, learn to constantly check yourself in a mirror to see how you look to men, you perform for them, and this theatrical anxiety forms or deforms or stops altogether what you do and say and sometimes think. You learn to think of what you are in terms of what they want, and addressing their want becomes so ingrained in you that you lose sight of what you want, and sometimes you vanish to yourself in the art of appearing to and for others.”
  
  Beautiful is the way in which Solnit indicates how, like so many other women, she quickly learned to 'become invisible', hence the reference in the title to her non-existence. “I became expert at fading and slipping and sneaking away, backing off, squirming out of tight situations, dodging unwanted hugs and kisses and hands, at taking up less and less space on the bus as yet another man spread into my seat, at gradually disengaging, or suddenly absenting myself. At the art of nonexistence, since existence was so perilous.”
  
  Because that is the mechanism she puts her finger on: how men time and again succeed in not taking women seriously, and thus, for example, engage in condescending 'mansplaining'. According to Solnit, we should not minimize that: it belongs to a spectrum where at the extreme end also murder must be situated. Again I had to swallow when I read this, but she is right, putting things as sharp as that is necessary, as is – unfortunately – daily proven.
  
  Before you get the impression that Solnit is a one-trick pony: this book also contains many more considerations than just about the female condition. I already knew her from her
  Wanderlust: A History of Walking and
  A Field Guide to Getting Lost in which she offers (literally) alternative paths to approach reality, alternative with regard to western modernity. Solnit also briefly discusses this in these memoires. For instance, she links the feminist struggle with that of the Native Americans, and also draws hope from it: “I argued that we had a lot of power, a history of forgotten and undervalued victories, that while somethings were getting worse, the long view – especially if you were nonmale, or nonstraight, or nonwhite – showed some remarkable improvement in our rights and roles, and that the consequences of our acts were not knowable in advance.”
  
  Not everything in this book is gold. In addition to the perhaps a little too one-sided focus on feminism, these memories also contain reckonings and self-justifications, as with any memoir. But fortunately, there's Solnit's unsurpassed style, which when you get used to it, is truly mesmerizing and captivates. For this she has developed a galvanizing writing process that can be called unique, in which she starts from a general statement, and then explores other views via side roads and thus arrives at a deeper experience of reality: “I believe in the irreducible and in invocation and evocation, and I am fond of sentences less like superhighways than winding paths, with the occasional scenic detour or pause to take in the view, since a footpath can traverse steep and twisting terrain that a paved road cannot. I know that sometimes what gets called digression is pulling in a passenger who fell off the boat.”
  
  In addition, what she writes about reading and writing, and about the special form of empathy that reading entails, goes right to my heart! Absolutely recommended
• 
  Jaclyn

  One does not review Solnit, one imbibes her wisdom and words and feels grateful.
• 
  BecSoBookish

  This book was...fine. I enjoy reading Solnit's essays, so I was looking forward to reading her memoir, thinking that I would actually learn a bit more about her. This was very much focused on Solnit finding her voice and learning how to use it through her writing. The problem is that she neglects to tell the reader anything personal about herself. I felt so disconnected from the author. She almost completely skips over her childhood and starts the memoir with her as a young adult living on her own. She skims over relationships, friendships, or anything that would showcase emotion. Solnit spends a large chunk of the book going over events of the 1970s and 1980s, dropping names of artists and writers and movements that I've never heard of, and only spending 20 pages or so on her career from the 2000s onward, which is the point at which she became well-known as an author. I think it was a mistake on the part of the publisher to market this as a memoir, since it really is a series of recollections on a writer finding her voice, with very little biographical information at all.
• 
  Sarah

  4.5 rounded down
  
  When I heard
  Rebecca Solnit was publishing a memoir this year it quickly became one of my most anticipated releases of 2020 - having enjoyed a number of her previous collections (including
  Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters,
  A Field Guide to Getting Lost,
  The Faraway Nearby and
  Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises to name but a few) Solnit is one of my favourite living essayists.
  
  And this is a very "Solnit" memoir. Rather than being a straight retelling of the formative events of her life thus far the reader learns about the author and how she has become the writer she is today through snippets of her past which are seamlessly weaved into writing in a style typical of her essays. A key theme is (duh) her identity, and how gender is inextricably linked to that - and how her experience of gender through her life as a white American woman in the 20th and 21st centuries has contributed to the writer she has become today. I found myself relating closely to a lot of what she said and ended up highlighting long sections of writing. There've been times in the past where I've felt that even though the topics she has chosen to write about are quite zeitgeist-y and the essays are published still in that moment that they already feel a bit passé, but I have to say I never felt that here.
  
  Highly recommended to everyone, but I think those who are already fans of Solnit will enjoy this even more.
  
  Thank you Netgalley and Granta Publications for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.
• 
  Steve

  My, my, my .... that was an exquisite, though-provoking, sublime, powerful book.
  
  Sure, it's a memoir, but it's much more. Solnit recollects a writer's life, and the history, the journey, the articulation of the craft, the circuitous route to productivity and readership, was as inspirational as it was engaging, interesting, and inspiring.
  
  But, ultimately, Solnit's voice is a woman's voice, and not merely a powerful voice, but a clear and compelling and lyrical voice ... speaking about the evolution of her voice. And that's a remarkable story well told.
  
  I'm not sure what it says that, until recently, I was (almost entirely) unfamiliar with Solnit and that, left to my own devices, I never would have found her or this book. My sense is that Traister's GOOD AND MAD (which I read at just the right moment and found compelling and now frequently recommend) prodded me in this direction, and for that I'm grateful.
  
  Caveat/disclaimer: Based on its size and length, what looks and feels like a slender volume, I'd generally describe a book of this size as a little book, but it's anything but. It a big book ... in terms of content, ideas, gratifying riffs, etc. ... even if it's been marketed in a less-than-massive package. Nor is it necessarily a quick read. I found the short chapters perfect for savoring the book, digesting a little each day, often sitting and enjoying and ruminating on each (again, brief) chapter. ... And, throughout, I found myself re-reading passages - phrases, sentences, and paragraphs - that were elegantly crafted and demanding of additional attention and consideration.
  
  Reader's delight: I read the hardback version (not long after it was published), and I admit that I was intrigued ... not only as a reader, but as a photographer ... by the cover photo. Without offering any spoilers, I'll merely concede that I was immensely gratified, almost giddy, with the passage in the book that placed the photograph in context (which could not have been further from than what I expected). Nicely played, Rebecca Solnit.
  
  Now that she's on my radar screen (and reading list), I'm guessing I'll turn to Wanderlust next. But for now, I ecstatic that I found and read this book.
• 
  Laura Noggle

  Absolutely gorgeous, love Solnit! Will definitely revisit this one again.
  🖤
  “It was a lovely fortune to be handed by a stranger, and I took it, and with it the sense that who I was meant to be was a breaker of some stories and a maker of others, a tracer of the cracks and sometimes a repair-woman, and sometimes a porter or even a vessel for the most precious cargo you can carry, the stories waiting to be told, and the stories that set us free.”
  
  “What is armor after all but a cage that moves with you?”
  
  “Nonfiction is at its best an act of putting the world back together—or tearing some piece of it apart to find what's hidden beneath the assumptions or conventions—and in this sense creation and destruction can be akin. The process can be incandescent with excitement, whether from finding some unexpected scrap of information or from recognizing the patterns that begin to arise as the fragments begin to assemble. Something you didn't know well comes into focus, and the world makes sense in a new way, or an old assumption is gutted, and then you try to write it down.”
  
  "When I read, I ceased to be myself, and this nonexistence I pursued and devoured like a drug. I faded into an absent witness, someone who was in that world but not anyone in it, or who was every word and road and house and ill omen and forlorn hope. I was anyone and no one and nothing and everywhere in those hours and years lost in books. I was a fog, a miasma, a mist, someone who dissolved into the story, got lost in it, learned to lose myself this way as a reprieve from the task of being a child and then a woman and the particular child and woman I was. I hovered about in many times and places, worlds and cosmologies, dispersing and gathering and drifting."
• 
  Britta Böhler

  4.5*
• 
  lavenderews

  Niesamowicie napisana! Wyrażająca tak wiele, zmuszająca do refleksji.
• 
  Julie Ehlers

  This was similar to the other Rebecca Solnit books I've read: Mostly her musings around issues of social injustice (primarily sexism), with some personal aspects used to illustrate some of her points. That's fine, but since this one was specifically billed as a memoir, I was expecting a lot more of the personal. She did paint a good picture of the Bay Area in the 1980s and the personal aspects I did get were very interesting, but overall I was a wee bit disappointed. 3.5, rounded up because I still liked it better than The Faraway Nearby.
• 
  Rakhi Dalal

  As I was reading this book, there was a heated debate on social media in India on the PIL challenging the existing law on marital rape in the Indian Penal Code.
  
  I saw men coming out claiming their rights, while speaking against the suggested amendment because as of now our system doesn't hold marital rape under the purview of punishable crime except if the girl is a minor.
  
  Wow, I thought. Do these men have any idea what it is like to live as a woman in a male centric world where all we do all the day is be on our guards?
  
  It doesn't matter whether we are outside in the world, studying or working, or within the relative safety of walls of our homes, we are always on the look out for a possible threat. And it isn't just about danger to our bodies but also about the burden of values and expectations imposed upon us by the patriarchal norms which tells us either directly or indirectly that our lives are not as important.
  
  I mean do they have the lens to see the world as we see it. Sometimes like an ever present threat to existence where our minds are constantly busy deciding which turn to take on a road, how to avoid unwarranted gaze or touch, just how to be invisible - to remain non existent. Do they know how much stress it is to be constantly on the watch.
  
  In a world where crime against women is an everyday reality, where women are killed everyday for just being women, how difficult is it to understand the ordeal which most women, especially those from unprivileged backgrounds, have to go through in their lives.
  
  Rebecca Solnit writes about her own experiences in this memoir. At the age of nineteen, in the early 1980s, she came out into the world to find herself. Although she doesn't write much about the violence she was exposed to in her family, it is evident how it did impact her. She writes about being a woman in a world, in times when women were being raped and killed everyday. She writes about much more though. This book makes you feel seen.
  
  Reading her, one realise the times haven't changed much. Only that now atleast we can voice our concerns, talk and fight for our rights and our voices are heard.
  
  It still is a long battle to go.
  
  PS: This is not a review but a rant. Please bear with it.
• 
  Kasa Cotugno

  In a series of beautifully written essays, Rebecca Solnit shares her life and what inspired her in her quest for individuality and respect as a person who writes and thinks, to not be fetishized. She presents a well rounded description of what it has meant living in San Francisco, a city that itself has been fetishized and has changed before her eyes, neighborhoods transforming from zones of danger to whitewashed havens of coffee shops but where it is less perilous for women in particular to walk at night. Full disclosure, I lived around the corner from her for a number of years and watched that same neighborhood in transition.
• 
  Tanya

  This memoir was my first foray into Solnit's long-form writing after having become a fan of her feminist essays, through which she gained popularity. If you liked those, this more personal piece will likely resonate with you too—her essays have a very distinct voice that blends the political and the anecdotal (the political is personal, after all) while remaining inclusive, and this memoir is written in the same vein. I love the title, and it's really the aptest one she could've gone with, since the thread running throughout each chapter is how she found her voice in a society that would've preferred to rob women of one.
  
  

  "I became silently furious, back in the day when I had no clear feminist ideas, just swirling inchoate feelings of indignation and insubordination. A great urge to disrupt the event [reviewer's note: the opening for an exhibition of Allen Ginsberg photographs, with two sad, mentally ill women as the only female subjects in the entire show] overtook me; I wanted to shout and to shout that I was not disrupting it because a woman is no one, and to shout that since I did not exist my shouting did not exist either and could not be objectionable. I was, in that room, that time, clear and angry about my nonexistence that was otherwise mostly just brooding anxiety somewhere below the surface."

  
  
  Keeping her background as a writer on art, culture, places, and political and environmental issues in mind, it might not come as a surprise that this is not your standard biography. You won't learn much about Solnit as a person as far as hard facts go, and more often than not, it was not so much about her, but rather about what was happening around her, and how that influenced her life's trajectory. It's more of a series of snapshots of a different time and place, a portrait of the artist as a young woman, recounting the watershed moments in her formative years (and beyond) that led to her becoming the writer and activist that she is, while fighting against a culture that wanted to silence and erase her, make her disappear.
  
  In more ways than one, it reminded me of Patti Smith's airy, bohemian memoirs, but less dreamy, more tangible and coherent (and Solnit criticizes many of the artists Smith reveres). The language is lyrical, the feelings very relatable, and much like
  Just Kids was a love-letter to New York City in the late 60's and early 70's, Recollections Of My Nonexistence is an ode to 1980s San Francisco, with its vibrant queer culture, before the gentrification (which she contributed to), despite the pervasive atmosphere of gender violence, and also to the vast expanse of the American West, in which she found direction and clarity by solitarily drifting and wandering, as Smith did in
  Year of the Monkey. She made me nostalgic for a time I haven't lived through, in a city I've only ever visited once, and deserts I've only driven through on dusty roads.
  
  

  "Out on your own, you're a new immigrant to the nation of adults, and the customs are strange; you're learning to hold together all the pieces of a life, figure out what that life is going to be and who is going to be part of it, and what you will do with your self-determination. You are in your youth walking down a long road that will branch and branch again, and your life is full of choices with huge and unpredictable consequences, and you rarely get to come back and choose the other route. You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail, a little, a lot, miserably, fatally."
  
  "I have no regrets about the roads I took, but a little nostalgia for that period when most of the route is ahead, for that stage in which you might become many things that is so much the promise of youth, now that I have chosen and chosen again and again and am far down one road and far past many others. Possibility means that you might be many things that you are not yet, and it is intoxicating when it's not terrifying."

  
  
  The evocativeness of her writing is probably a big part of how she always manages to leave me feeling hopeful, despite the horrid things it often dwells upon. Many feminist works gets me angry and riles me up, which is good and necessary—nasty women get shit done—but too much of it, and, in the long run, you'll just wear out and despair. Solnit walks that fine line of educating and empowering, while also encouraging to believe in the potential for change. She's lived through many seismic shifts in society herself, which has given her her own hope, and she passes it along to the reader, as a little light to keep you safe and hopeful in the dark.
  
  In digital books, I often highlight quotes that make an impression on me; either because of the beauty of the writing itself, the pictures they evoke, the relatable feelings they describe, or sometimes even just because I think that they'd fit into a later review nicely, but I'm finding that I did a poor job here, or rather, Solnit did hers exceptionally well: I didn't highlight sentences, passages, or even paragraphs, but entire pages of text because they resonated with me so strongly, so I'm leaving much out. Instead, I'll wrap up with this beautiful thought; a different kind of nonexistence, and one I cherish more than almost anything.
  
  

  "When I read, I ceased to be myself, and this nonexistence I pursued and devoured like a drug. I faded into an absent witness, someone who was in that world but not anyone in it, or who was every word and road and house and ill omen and forlorn hope. I was anyone and no one and nothing and everywhere in those hours and years lost in books. I was a fog, a miasma, a mist, someone who dissolved into the story, got lost in it, learned to lose myself this way as a reprieve from the task of being a child and then a woman and the particular child and woman I was. I hovered about in many times and places, worlds and cosmologies, dispersing and gathering and drifting."

  
  
  —————
  
  Note: I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
• 
  Domenico Fina

  «Divenni esperta a sparire e sgattaiolare via, a indietreggiare, a divincolarmi dalle situazioni in cui potevo finire alle strette, a scansare abbracci e baci e mani moleste, a stringermi in spazi sempre più esigui sull’autobus mentre un uomo si allargava verso il mio sedile, a sganciarmi gradualmente o a sparire all’improvviso. Esperta nell’arte di non esistere visto che esistere era tanto pericoloso.
  […] Per non essere uccise passiamo il tempo morendo».
  
  Questo libro è molto bello, così come il suo titolo. C’è un capitolo (“Liberamente di notte”) in cui Rebecca Solnit si sofferma a parlare del suo amore per la lettura; be’ sono pagine meravigliose. Ricorda più volte del mito di Filomela, dalle Metamorfosi di Ovidio, Filomela violentata da suo cognato viene amputata della lingua affinché non rivelasse dello stupro. Filomela tesse la sua storia su un arazzo che farà avere, avvalendosi dei gesti, a sua sorella (ossia la moglie del suo stupratore). Rebecca Solnit scrive: «Quando la verità è indicibile la si dice in modo indiretto. Quando ti privano della parola a parlare sono altre cose. A volte è il corpo - le eruzioni cutanee, i tic, gli intorpidimenti, le paralisi - che racconta cosa è accaduto in modo cifrato».
  
  Non impressionatevi dalle righe dolenti, questo è un memoir vario, speranzoso, coraggioso.
  
  C’è un’altra pagina notevole in cui Rebecca Solnit descrive di una sera in cui tornando verso casa, intorno alla mezzanotte, si vide affiancata da un individuo alto, barba incolta e capelli lunghi; accelerò il passo, lui le restò vicino - a distanza fissa di sessanta centimetri, scrive - per un lungo tratto di strada, le sussurrava che non voleva farle del male, che non era una persona pericolosa, che era un suo amico, più lo dichiarava e più l’atmosfera si faceva inquietante, fino a quando un’auto accostò al marciapiede, una portiera si aprì e lei vi si tuffò dentro. L’uomo alla guida dell’auto, avrebbe potuto essere altrettanto pericoloso, ma non lo fu, le disse che l’aveva notata in pericolo, quasi dentro un film di Hitchcock e aveva voluto aiutarla.
  «Sono grata che un uomo mi abbia salvata da un altro uomo. Avrei preferito non trovarmi dentro un film di Hitchcock in cui avevo bisogno di essere salvata».
• 
  Nev

  Holy shit. Rebecca Solnit’s writing is absolutely gorgeous. Her memoir focuses on feminism, how her identity as a woman has impacted her life as a writer, and larger movements outside of her own experience. She writes about street harassment, violence against women, and how keeping women silent and discrediting their voices leads to real harm.
  
  I can’t adequately express how amazing this book was. So many passages and lines gave me chills. Especially during the sections focused on violence against women.
  
  This is the first book I’ve read from Rebecca Solnit but now I’m definitely going to seek out more of her writing.
• 
  Dave

  I was attacked when I was 18 and walking to work by a gang of teenagers I frowned at (they were throwing rocks at parked cars from a bridge). Though I got punched a few times, I was quickly rescued by a couple of passersby who yelled at the kids so that I could slink away, ashamed and terrified. From that moment on, I was frightened--for years--about walking alone. I was so angry at those macho shitheads, and could never tell whether or not the next stranger was a threat.
  
  But I am male, and white, and bulky enough not to look like an easy target. I am privileged in a way that women and African-Americans and many others are not. My temporary fear didn't keep me from going to the movies alone, from biking and hiking alone in deserted areas, from not even thinking about the possibility of disaster while taking a solo driving tour across the West.
  
  All of this is to say that Rebecca Solnit's memoir describes an early life in which the macho shitheads control her behavior, her voice, her sense of self and safety. That isn't to say that kindness is absent; but that, lurking in all of the places she enjoys, there is always the threat of someone who could attack her--verbally or physically. I cannot imagine and would never like to experience that existence; and I know that most women and many individuals face it daily for their whole lives. Her feminist voice is one that she is rightly proud of achieving, and one that calls out for the demolishing of the patriarchal/misogynist attitude so widespread in America.
  
  Easy for me to say, and so hard for her. This book is not as sharp and clear and terse as her essay collections--her "hopscotch" method of approaching stories leaves some details fuzzier than I wish they were. But since that move toward clarity of speech and confidence is what the book is about, I am OK that I still have questions: I know that they will be answered in one of her other books.
  
  And I love her emphases on hope and kindness. I still grieve that I never thanked those two people (man and woman) who chased off the gang of kids attacking me with no thought of their own safety. But I will always treasure their kindness. And I have hope (even in the midst of this lockdown, and with the government we are currently experiencing) that there is a trend toward a better world, as issues that Solnit (and many others) speak of are spoken of by more and more people.
  
  You should read her.
• 
  Jan Priddy

  Yes, that is Rebecca Solnit on the cover, trying to both reveal herself and merge into the wall. She is very young in the photo, still a teenager and she will travel a long way to get to where she is today.
  
  Solnit's memoir begins with the black manager of a building in San Francisco helping her rent her first apartment at seventeen, how she came to know members of the local community, where she walked and why. She lived there for twenty-five years and watched the neighborhood change, watched AIDS come to the Castro, watched her own life happen. She found courage and friends, and she is a person I would enjoy sitting with for a few hours talking about . . . everything.
  
  This is likely the best book I will read this year. I connected to Solnit's observations and concerns, despite being nine years older, short and plump instead of tall and scary-thin, raised north of Seattle instead of San Francisco, and gifted with a kindly father instead of a brutal one. I know the times she describes and the concerns she wrestled.
  

  “To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once.”

  
  The way the evening sky in the west somehow manages to shift from amber-orange to aqua without passing green; the way I have found the term "girl" to be demeaning, trivializing when applied to women; the way, like most women I know, I have lived my life in recognition of the threat too often posed to me because I am female. Along the way, Solnit meets artists who challenge her views of the world, participates in movements to save landscape and peoples and principles, and finds new questions and reasons for hope. (I too have been attacked for having hope—how strange is that?) She describes how she pursued writing as a profession and how she became a writer of books and how men insisted on explaining her own areas of expertise, about which they sometimes knew less than nothing.
  
  There is some overlap with her collections of essays, but I did not mind that at all. She excludes details about her childhood that I am less interested in than in her overcoming it. Some people enjoy reading about the fall; I have always valued the process by which people regain their feet. Rather than a record of repression and cruelty, this is a memoir of rising despite it all.
  
  
• 
  Christine

  I know I should write a detailed review with reasons and everything.
  
  But . . .
  
  Rebecca Solnit gives me hope for humanity.
• 
  Claire

  Having read a few of Rebecca Solnit's collections, I'm used to her meandering mind or circular style of narrative, so while this might have a #memoir tag that indicates a book recounts a slice of the author's life, Solnit's essays are less 'slice of life' and more 'thought bubbles' as she starts out recalling her early adult life, eight years in a neighbourhood of San Franscisco, the people she came into contact with, the situations she avoided as a woman and then pauses now from years afar and wonders about her impact on that neighbourhood, her contribution to its demise, to its gentrification removing its diversity, colour, vibrancy and ultimately affordability.
  
  The title perhaps pays homage to Diana di Prima's
  Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years, a feminist beatnik poet I first came across earlier in 2020 when I was reading all I could about the year 1968, the year she wrote
  Revolutionary Letters, a series of poems composed of utopian anarchism and ecological awareness, scribbled from a spiritual, feminist perspective. All touch points within Solnit's reportoire, however she writes in and of a different era, scratching at the surface of our nonexistence, how that is actively contributed to by others and of her/our own hand.
  
  Recalling a sensation of disappearing, as if on the verge of fainting; rather than the world disappearing she senses herself disappear. Thus introduces the metaphor of nonexistence and discovers/exposes the many ways it is enacted.
  

  In those days I was trying to disappear and to appear, trying to be safe and to be someone, and those agendas were often at odds with each other.

  
  Because of the meandering style, it's not easy to recall which particular vignette or essay has the most impact, however I note that I've highlighted 107 passages, her words provoke, recollect, igniting the reader's memory and own experience.
  
  She struggles writing poetry as a young woman, not doing it well, but ferociously, unaware of what or why she was resisting, often resulting in a murky, incoherent, erratic defiance, something she observes today, as young women around her fight 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.

  
  And though we all know we learn from our own experiences, there is something reassuring in reading or hearing of those who've trod a similar path; she expresses a desire that the young women coming after her might skip some of the old obstacles, that some of her writing exists to that end, at least by naming those obstacles.
  
  Discussing harassment and violence towards women, particularly young women, she ponders how and what she is able to do differently being an older woman, compared to how she reacted and behaved in youth.
  

  So much of what makes young women good targets is self-doubt and self-effacement.

  
  Observing how we strengthen our purpose over time, gaining orientation and clarity, she recognises something like ripeness and calm flowing in, as the urgency and naiveté of youth ebb. I think of this her book
  The Faraway Nearby where she revisits childhood and a difficult mother, unrecognisable in the woman she then tends, neither of them who they once were, there is no need to hang on to the earlier version. Ripeness was a metaphor here too, one she desired to observe mature fully, she left a pile of apricots picked from the trees on the floor of a room, like an art installation, left to mature, rot, transform.
  
  In the collection she looks back at her own evolution as a writer, and recalls for example the conversation that provoked the essay 'Men Explain Things to Me' that went on to become that new word that has now become mainstream 'mansplaining'.
  
  She rereads photocopies of letters in handwriting that is no longer her own and meets a person who was her, but no longer exists, who didn't know how to speak.
  

  The young writer I met there didn't know how to speak from the heart, though I could be affectionate...She was speaking in various voices because she didn't yet know what voice was hers, or rather she had not yet made one.

  
  
  Furnishing her mind with readings, they become part of the equipment of imagination, her set of tools for understanding the world, creating patterns, learning enough to "trace paths though the forests of books, learn landmarks and lineages." She celebrates the pleasure of meeting new voices, ideas and possibilities that help make the world more coherent in some way, extending or filling in the map of one's universe, grateful for their ability to bring beauty, find pattern and meaning, creating pure joy.
  
  Discussing patterns of how women were portrayed in novels by men she read in the past, she becomes aware of relating to the part of the male protagonist, where
  

  'women devoured to the bone are praised; often those insistent on their own desires needs are reviled or rebuked for taking up space, making noise. You are punished unless you punish yourself into nonexistence.'

  
  It was Nella Larsen, author of Quicksand and Passing who said:
  

  “Authors do not supply imaginations, they expect their readers to have their own, and to use it.”

  
  and Rebecca Solnit carries that thought further and observes something astonishing about reading:
  

  about that suspension of your own time and place to travel into others'. It's a way of disappearing from where you are...a world arises in your head that you have built at the author's behest, and when you're present in that world you're absent from you own...It's the reader who brings the book to life.

  
  She finds research exciting and piecing together a nonfiction narrative like craft and medicine combined, a combination of creativity and healing.
  

  Research is often portrayed as dreary and diligent, but for those with a taste for this detective work there's the thrill of the chase - of hunting data, flushing obscure things out of hiding, of finding fragments that assemble into a picture.

  
  Even if some of this is familiar from previous works, it is the reworking of the landscape of her mind, the rearranging of those experiences, interviews, a more mature awareness and wakefulness that makes her work so readable, engaging and accessible and relevant to what is happening in the fast changing world we inhabit.
  

  Nonfiction is at its best an act of putting the world back together - or tearing some piece of it apart to find what's hidden beneath the assumptions or conventions...recognizing the patterns that begin to arise as the fragments begin to assemble.

  
  
  Highly Recommended.
• 
  Mina

  I've had Solnit's memoir collecting dust on my bookshelf for a couple of months now. We formed a bit of routine you see; I pick it up slant my head contemplate if that particular day will be the chosen day that I decide to finally get to immerse myself in the the life of the essayist and the self proclaimed feminist that is Rebecca Solnit..Then I'm like naah put the book back and go back to watching Good Girls on Netflix.
  But finally the day came when I got my head out of my a$% ... (I finished all 3 seasons of Good Girls) and decided why the hell not
  I didn't like Men Explain Things To Me ( TBRH only the title was captivating) so time to get intimate with RS again.
  Sigh. To my not so shocking revelation I wasn't that captivated with the book. I think we all knew where this would end up. I give up on this woman.
  
  I'm not that motivated to go into details I skimmed through most of it and I was very much tempted to DNF.
  Bleugh
• 
  Mike

  Rebecca Solnit's writing has greatly informed my role in, and identification with, feminism (especially as a cis-gendered, straight, white man) and the stories in this book contain some of the best lessons I've learned from her to-date.
  
  For men who are doing the work of learning from women—working to understand their experience, working to question their own role in the challenges that women face, worldwide—this is a critically important book to read.
• 
  Debbi

  I am not sure how to rate a book like this. It is important, it is intense, it is beautifully written. There is a strong focus on the violence that women are forced to endure on a daily basis. The book made me want to squeeze my eyes shut and cry. I had to put it aside.
• 
  Patricia

  I am grateful and awed by Solnit's powerful advocacy, by her courage and skill at putting words to experiences many of us have trouble facing and articulating. She also writes joyfully and memorably about people and art and her first home. And she writes her own enchanting account of what makes reading so wondrous even as she is pointing out the limitations of living only in books, "I swam through oceans and rivers of worlds and their incantatory power. In fairy tales naming something gives you power over it; a spell is some words you say that makes things happens. These are just concentrated versions of how words make that words and take us into its heart, how a metaphor opens up a new possibility, a simile builds a bridge" (115). I look forward to re-reading this one.
• 
  Tosh

  This is, oddly enough, my first Rebecca Solnit book. It's an interesting read, but what surprises me the most is that she did a dissertation on my father Wallace Berman. I didn't know that.
• 
  Alex Sarll

  A memoir of sorts, but as always with Solnit, it conforms to a genre only in so far as she feels like that's useful. "I am not a proper memoir writer in that I cannot reconstruct a convincing version of any of our conversations", she says at one point, and what reference is made to anything before she left home is pretty oblique, though the implications are clear enough all the same – "I'm uninterested in the brutalities of childhood in part because that species has been so dwelt upon while some of the brutalities that come after have not." In large part it is the story precisely of how she came to write the books that she did, a biography of her poetics or her voice more than her self, but which necessarily addresses the self too simply because every voice must come from somewhere, because the journalism teachers who wanted clipped faux-objectivity and the English professor who considered Hemingway the zenith of English style were wrong, and must be shown to be wrong: "I believe in the irreducible and in invocation and evocation, and I am fond of sentences less like superhighways than winding paths". Which she crafts so very well. It's the height of cliche to say that someone writes like a dream, but in Solnit's case it's true in very precise ways: as in a dream, there are areas of evocative mistiness, but others of pin-sharp clarity, and the transitions between the two which you'd think might feel juddering instead happen so smoothly you barely notice that the corridor from your old school is now in a cruise liner on the Moon, or that a description of the first room where Solnit lived independently has flipped, by way of the history of her writing desk, into a disquisition on the weight and the ubiquity of gendered violence, and the even wider erasure with which it's in symbiosis. This has been the recurrent topic of Solnit's recent work, and the one which has made her famous at a whole different level since the publication of Men Explain Things To Me; it's also, she explains here, the one topic she's written about which she never consciously set out to make one of her themes. And isn't there a horrible irony in the way it's forced itself on her like that? One strand of Recollections sees Solnit go back through her previous work, adding in the details not just about how they came to be written, or their legacy, but about the stuff she left out at the time – like the fear of what might happen to a lone woman walking, her own bad experiences in that area, which were a far more marginal presence in her books on walking and on getting lost. Here too you'll find the artist whose reputation she did much to salvage, and who repaid her with sexual harassment; the editors and publicists who sabotaged her either deliberately or simply because they couldn't be arsed not to. Some names are named; given the account of the bullshit lawsuit by one particularly choice specimen, I suspect she's sailed as close to the wind on that as she dared, and that this is a fair bit closer than most would. Of course, legally it helps that some of the culprits are dead now, as in the section monstering the Beats; I especially loved her observation that even Homer, hardly Mr Woke, gives the static women in the Odyssey far more interiority and agency than Kerouac cared to in On The Road.
  
  Not that that's the whole book. It's also a love letter to San Francisco, at least as it was, alongside a recognition of her own small and unwitting part in its gentrification, having once been the first white face in a neighbourhood where her building supervisor was a black man who remembered Bonnie & Clyde hiding out with his sharecropper family. An attempt to capture the flat where she spent much of her life – and for all that I would never watch Through The Keyhole, and find conversations about home improvement make me want to eat my own face, there is something delightful about a writer who can convey these things just telling you about their old home. She talks about how books are like stars, records of fires burning long ago; about how the growth of the human skull, which must set but must not set too soon, is the perfect metaphor for the growth of humans in general. About how the straight male dream of impenetrability would be blind and fatal were it ever realised in full; about how the present becomes past like the colours shading into each other in the evening sky; about the books one reads more to take up residency than to get to the end. This is the sort of stuff that first got me into Solnit, with her Field Guide To Getting Lost, and there's a part of me (and, she's said elsewhere, of her) that would love her to be able to get back to it – not least because that would mean we were in a better world where there was no longer such an urgent need for the angry dissection of the endless tide of pricks. Towards the end she talks about the writers who are less remembered and read because they changed the culture, were assimilated into the compost of the collective way of seeing, which feels almost like she's taking stock of her legacy, though I hope there's plenty more to come, that she's still writing once the wars are won. And if not, well, at least she can already say "I wanted to be pretty much what I eventually became".
  
  (Netgalley ARC)