How Rebecca Solnit Found Her Voice

nonfiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. RECOLLECTIONS OF MY NONEXISTENCE By Rebecca Solnit At dinner one evening in 2008, Rebecca Solnit joked to a friend about writing an essay called “Men Explain Things to Me. ” The friend, who was staying with Solnit “in flight from an awful soon-to-be ex,” told her that such an essay was definitely worth writing — younger women needed it. So in one sitting early the next morning, Solnit did so, describing her encounter with a man who explained her own book to her at a party, and the silencing of women by men in general.

The essay, which surprised her by going viral, “poured out with ease or rather tumbled out seemingly of its own accord,” Solnit writes in her new memoir, “Recollections of My Nonexistence. ” “When this happens it means that the thoughts have long been gestating and writing is only a birth of what was already taking form out of sight. ” While “Men Explain Things to Me” introduced her work to a broader audience, Solnit has long been known for a particular style of prose that refracts history, politics, personal experience and criticism through a poetic lens. Her more than 20 books feature wide-ranging yet incisive reflections on time, memory, art, mythology and the American West.

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. “Recollections of My Nonexistence” is 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. Solnit begins with the tiny studio apartment she moved into in the Western Addition neighborhood in San Francisco at the age of 19, in the early 1980s.

Much of the book is a loving portrait of the city during that “less expensive era” when “eccentricity had many footholds. ” She recalls conversations with long-established neighbors in the same memorable detail she does that particular casting about of youth. Her discoveries of place and self are, in fact, inseparable. After removing the peeling wallpaper in her apartment (“I felt the vivid presence of the people who had lived there before me”) and noting her kitchen’s second, deep laundry sink (“women had washed clothes by hand in it”), she has a recurring dream in which the apartment opens up into another room: “In some way it was me and I was it, and so these discoveries were, of course, other parts of myself.