In a now-storied anecdote, Rebecca Solnit and her friend go to a party at an Aspen chalet. While there, they are cornered by the older, wealthy host, and, after Solnit mentions that she has written a book on the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, subjected to a grandiose lecture about a “very important” Muybridge book that has just been published. “That’s her book,” Solnit’s friend keeps trying to say. But, as Solnit recounts in the blockbuster essay “Men Who Explain Things,” from 2008, the host presses on, “with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.”
The encounter was a gift: it magnified absurdities that often skitter away in the light of direct observation. When Guernica republished the essay in 2012, the year of a gang sexual assault in Steubenville, Ohio, the connection between rape and condescending to women at parties shone less brightly than it does now. But there was a stink in the air, and Solnit put words to it. (The piece inspired a now-ubiquitous term, “mansplaining.”) Solnit’s essay collection, called “Men Explain Things to Me,” arrived in 2014; three years later, she tackled themes of power, misogyny, and gendered violence in another book, “The Mother of All Questions.” Since then, Solnit has been recognized as one of the country’s most incisive feminist writers. What perhaps goes less acknowledged is her omnivorousness. In the twenty-plus titles she has to her name, she’s examined disaster utopias; arctic expeditions; her mother’s Alzheimer’s; the allure of getting lost; San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York (in the atlas series “Infinite Cities”); and popular and literary imaginings of the American West. These are subjects, not coincidentally, that open themselves to Solnit’s broader interests: in place and nature, in margins and silenced voices, and in the inability of words and history to capture reality. To read Solnit is to brush up against emotions and intuitions you almost don’t recognize, because language is so seldom considered the best way to approach them.
Although Solnit has long worked in a personal register, her latest book, “Recollections of My Nonexistence,” is her first to bear the label of “memoir”—and the first, perhaps, not to take its author’s existence for granted. The book begins with a nineteen-year-old Solnit, a woman who feels only half there, drifting through the world like mist. While a senior at San Francisco State University, she moves into a new apartment. The place is huge, antiquated, and cheap. It’s situated in a historically working-class neighborhood that is “alive,” Solnit writes, “in a way that made the suburban places I’d grown up in seem dead and bereft.” Living there, an outsider among outsiders, Solnit begins to claim a sort of “nonexistence”: a romantic, freeing state, in which she finds herself unburdened by society’s expectations.
Solnit has a deep feel for placeness—a mirror is a body of water; a woman’s body is “territory” to annex or defend—and she imbues even literal sites with symbolic meaning. For her, the apartment represents an education in the richness of the margins. At one point, she strips away its brick-patterned wallpaper to reveal an inner layer, imprinted with brown ivy lattices. Not long after, she dreams that she is tearing the wallpaper off again, and surfacing a different design. (One of the book’s chapters takes its title from “Diving into the Wreck,” the Adrienne Rich poem about self-excavation.) These episodes—aside from winking at the work of memoir—introduce some of the crucial architecture of Solnit’s world view: a hunger for histories and for the bounty of what often goes unseen. One lineage resides in her walls; another lives outside them, in her city’s thriving queer culture, which offers her fresh insight on how to exist as a woman. Gay men, she writes, “modeled for me the radical beauty of refusing your assignment, and if they did not have to be what they were supposed to be, then neither did I.”
To her credit, Solnit acknowledges the privilege of her position. She is a guest of poverty, not a permanent resident. At any moment, she can leave the communities that she has chosen as her own. And there is, at times, a hint of adolescent rebellion to her early fantasies of vanishing, of slipping the grasp of place. Writing about her life as a young reader, Solnit exults, “When I read, I ceased to be myself, and this nonexistence I pursued and devoured like a drug. . . . I was a fog, a miasma, a mist.” The freedom of hovering everywhere and nowhere is a child’s prerogative, evidence of an unformed self. And yet owning her particular body and mind is never less of a preoccupation for Solnit than disappearing is. “I was trying not to be the subject of someone else’s poetry and not to get killed,” she writes, tartly summarizing her twenties.
Such lines point to the book’s political dimension. Although Solnit sometimes attributes her “nonexistence” to benign causes—her apartment, her beckoning inner life—there is, of course, a darker explanation. “That a lot of men wanted and still want to harm women, especially young women, that a lot of people relished that harm, and a lot more dismissed it, impacted me in profoundly personal ways,” Solnit writes. She begins to feel as though she’s living through a war that no one will acknowledge. Self-negation becomes not a thrill but a truce, a promise of safety. At “its most brutally conventional,” Solnit writes, femininity is “a perpetual disappearing act, an erasure and a silencing to make more room for men.” She develops an obsession with armor, which stifles one’s “tender depths” and obscures “how much of life that matters takes place there.” Killing yourself in order to spare men the trouble, Solnit decides, is characteristically female.
Writing, then, becomes how Solnit declares her identity over the next several decades. Perhaps more important, it becomes how she creates her identity, because one cannot transform into an author without first transforming into a person with beliefs, values, and desires—in short, a person with something to say. Solnit movingly describes her efforts to fashion “the self who will speak.” Her first persona strove for a cool and silky archness. “It was a hard voice on a short leash,” Solnit admits, and one hears echoes of her passage on armor, the “cage that moves with you” as you “throw all your consciousness into that surface.” As the memoir’s various channels of imagery—the wallpaper, the ocean—converge to suggest, the work of Solnit’s writing and life has since been to withdraw from the surface to the “tender depths.” This inward pull relates to her sense of memory and place: all topics are topos, terrain, their meanings leaved in geologic strata. There are phrases, such as “women’s stories,” “silencing,” or “gaslighting,” that contemporary discourse has emptied out. Solnit revives these terms with the breath of their own histories.
When Solnit dedicates herself fully to writing, her life changes, and so does her experience of sexism. The animal, physical threat of men turns into the professional inconvenience of men, the careerist jealousy of men. Solnit describes Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the president of her publishing house, City Lights, greeting, one afternoon, the man standing next to her, someone he’d briefly met once, while ignoring Solnit, an author he’d run into dozens of times over two years. She describes the publicist who assured her that he’d scheduled a series of readings to promote one of her books, only for her to discover, on the road, that none of the events existed. Solnit’s insight, ambient now, is that these slights are not discrete incidents; they fall on a spectrum. Especially in “Recollections,” her argument has less to do with gendered violence or professional discrimination than with how authority—over the facts, over oneself—is distributed. This represents a modest adjustment to Solnit’s earlier writings. After “The Mother of All Questions” came out, she drew criticism, in The New Yorker and elsewhere, for overestimating the impact of feminist storytelling. Here, Solnit separates voice-having, “that vital power,” into three pieces: audibility (people can hear you), credibility (people are willing to believe you), and consequence (your words have an effect).
Do Solnit’s words have an effect? 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—“I wanted transformation not of my nature but of my condition,” she writes at one point—but when she is studying the fine grain of intimate experience. Conjuring the pre-smartphone past, she writes:
In the minute or so it took me to read that passage, my phone chirped twice. I had a Twitter notification; the Times sent a news alert about the coronavirus. I thought then that the world was designed to drag people to its exhausting surface, and yearned for its depths.
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