Solnit reached greater prominence with the essays Hope in the Dark, written in 2003 at the start of the Iraq war, which became a manifesto against political despair, but it was her 2008 piece Men Explain Things to Me that catapulted her into the mainstream, gave rise to the term “mansplaining” (which entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2014, though the neologism was not hers), made her an idol to a generation of young women and turned her into one of the US’s leading cultural and political commentators. I first encountered her through her 2000 book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and her work reminded me of essayists of the 1960s and 70s such as Susan Sontag and Joan Didion, who wove together personal experience, academic research, cultural history and pop culture into a new kind of nonfiction that seemed energetic and flexible enough to encompass any subject and offer new ways of seeing it. Looking back, she describes how she came to recognize that her own experiences of harassment and menace were inseparable from the systemic problem of who has a voice, or rather who is heard and respected and who is silenced-and how she was galvanized to use her own voice for change.T here was a time when Rebecca Solnit was a kind of underground secret, like a cult band you had to seek out in obscure venues and only the cognoscenti knew about hearing her writing mentioned by a new acquaintance meant you knew you’d found a soulmate. She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer-books themselves the gay community that presented a new model of what else gender, family, and joy could mean and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West.īeyond being a memoir, Solnit's book is also a passionate argument: that women are not just impacted by personal experience, but by membership in a society where violence against women pervades.

She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher, and of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself. In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. An electric portrait of the artist as a young woman that asks how a writer finds her voice in a society that prefers women to be silent

Recollections of my non existence