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Recollections of My Nonexistence

A Memoir

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On sale Mar 09, 2021 | 256 Pages | 9780593083345
Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography
Longlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political Writing

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, from the author of Orwell's Roses


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. 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. 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.

Beyond 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. 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.
Praise for Recollections of My Nonexistence:

“Much more than a feminist manifesto . . . Solnit movingly describes her efforts to fashion ‘the self who will speak’ . . . 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.” —Katy Waldman, The New Yorker 

"At the same time that [Solnit] describes her forays into her past, she invites us to connect pieces of her story to our own, as a measure of how far we've come and how far we have left to go." —Jenny Odell, The New York Times Book Review

“Throughout her rich body of work, essayist and critic Rebecca Solnit has revealed pieces of herself in writings about the beauty of getting lost, the joys of walking both for pleasure and with purpose, and perhaps most famously, the indignity of being mansplained to. At last, she uses her eagle eye to explore her own life. Recollections of My Nonexistence is a marvel: a memoir that details her awakening as a feminist, an environmentalist, and a citizen of the world. Every single sentence is exquisite.” —Maris Kreizman, Vulture

“[A] splendid memoir of longings and determinations, of resistances and revolutions, personal and political, illuminating the kiln in which one of the boldest, most original minds of our time was annealed.” —Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

“A clarion call of a memoir, chronicling, in unfettered, poetic prose, her coming-of-age . . . and her emergence as one of our most potent cultural critics.” O, The Oprah Magazine

“A resonant and moving portrait of how challenging life can be in the female body.” Time, “100 Must-Read Books of 2020”

“A deeply intimate and deeply internal book about how Solnit became one of the defining feminist thinkers of the twenty-first century [and] a nostalgic love letter to the San Francisco of her youth . . . Solnit writes beautifully and with much compassionate nuance about how the threat of violence and not just its execution colors all parts of a woman’s life, and how actual physical violence is just one of myriad ways that women are controlled, subjugated and silenced . . . This [book] is electrifying in its precision of thought and language.”San Francisco Chronicle

“Solnit has valiantly been making the case that misogynist speech and violence are on a spectrum for decades, long before mainstream acceptance of the idea . . . In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Solnit implies that just as the illness can be both dramatic and also cumulative, gradual, and imperceptible, so might be the cure. And things that feel insufficient — writing, talking, walking, teaching — do in fact represent tiny counterweights, which together shift the course of culture.” —NPR.org

“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] 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 . . . [It] often reads as a letter to young activists and women writers—less ‘back in my day’ and more ‘I fought, and am fighting, the same battles you are.’” —Jenny Odell, The New York Times Book Review

“Solnit begins this book of personal and cultural explorations with the memory of looking in a mirror and seeing herself disappear. It’s a fitting metaphor for a narrative that is as much a social history as it is a memoir, engaging questions of invisibility and silence and the way patriarchal forces seek to render women small.” Los Angeles Times

“Solnit emphasizes the need to find poetry in survival . . . [Recollections of My Nonexistence is] a voice raised in hope against gender violence. It’s a call we should listen to.” The Washington Post

“It is a rare writer who has both the intellectual heft and the authority of frontline experience to tackle the most urgent issues of our time. One of the reasons [Solnit] has won so many admirers is the sense that she is driven not by anger but by compassion and the desire to offer encouragement . . . That voice of hope is more essential now than ever, and this memoir is a valuable glimpse into the grit and courage that enabled her to keep telling sidelined stories.”The Guardian (London)

“Tracking Solnit’s coming of age as an artist and feminist in a San Francisco that was changing just as much as she was, this memoir explores Solnit’s moral formation—and erasure—while also acting as a biography of an American city that silences women, still.” —Courtney Maum, author of The Year of the Horses

“A brilliant memoir that is at once both of the moment and timeless . . . Recollections of My Nonexistence is all about liberation. And it invites us to think more broadly about what is possible in challenging times.” —John Nichols, The Progressive

“[A] feat of exacting labor, with places from decades ago remembered in their tiny details alongside a constant, simmering anger at how those same places were ordinary war zones for women.” Vanity Fair

“A work of feminist solidarity, in which [Solnit] chooses to write not from herself alone, but ‘for and about and often with the voices of other women talking about survival’ . . . What Solnit wants most is to talk about the obstacles her younger self found . . . She’s concerned with the way women disappear, or are encouraged to abdicate their bodies and their vocation . . . [A] meditation on creativity, home, and an elusive self.” 4Columns

“[A] splendid memoir of longings and determinations, of resistances and revolutions, personal and political, illuminating the kiln in which one of the boldest, most original minds of our time was annealed.” —Maria Popova, BrainPickings

“One of the more beautiful narratives I’ve read.” —Ezra Klein, Vox

“Rebecca Solnit’s opposition to injustice in its many forms, and her relentless inquiry as a writer and reporter into a great range of issues—racial injustice, nuclear weapons, indigenous rights, male hegemony—have defined the outrage and politics of much of her generation. In Recollections of My Nonexistence she draws all these potent metaphors for inequity together into a moral stance that transcends the particulars of all her topics. This is a remarkable book—smart, brave, edgy, insightful, and authentic.” —Barry Lopez

“One of our foremost thinkers on womanhood explores the journey of her becoming in this deeply personal memoir about her youth in San Francisco. In her searing, sensitive voice, Solnit recalls the epidemic of violence against women . . . tracing her journey as a writer through her journey to speak out on behalf of women.” Esquire

“Activist and essayist Rebecca Solnit has long captured the discomforts and difficulties of modern womanhood . . . [I]n describing [her youth], she details how she found her voice as an advocate for herself and those around her.” Time

“Fantastic . . . Solnit generously offers the story of finding her voice – exemplary as it is – as just one of the tales 'waiting to be told' in feminism’s twenty-first century.” BUST

“This powerful memoir reveals how Solnit’s coming-of-age as a journalist and a woman in 1980s San Francisco shaped her as a writer and a feminist. She grapples with sexual harassment, poverty, trauma, and women’s exclusion from the cultural conversation, while discovering punk rock and the LGBTQ+ community as safe havens. Her words have long empowered people who feel voiceless, and her latest book is no exception.” Good Housekeeping

“[Solnit] couches her own lived experience . . . within a larger exploration of contemporary womanhood and an unapologetically feminist, queer lens. While beautifully exercising her own literary voice, Solnit simultaneously poses the question: Who do we allow to characterize the female experience? And what needs to happen in order for that to change?”Parade

“An inquisitive, perceptive, and original thinker and enthralling writer . . . Solnit has created an unconventional and galvanizing memoir-in-essays that shares key, often terrifying, formative moments in her valiant writing life . . . [and] illuminates with piercing lyricism the body-and-soul dangers women face in our complexly, violently misogynist world . . . [A]n incandescent addition to the literature of dissent and creativity.” —Booklist (starred)

“While misogyny and its effect on women’s psyches is familiar territory for Solnit, as in her breakthrough 2014 essay collection, Men Explain Things To Me, here the prolific writer gets more personal than ever as she reflects upon her youth in 1980s San Francisco.” AV Club

“Absorbing . . . A perceptive, radiant portrait of a writer of indelible consequence.” Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“An engaging look at Solnit’s life, which succeeds in giving voice to inequity caused by patriarchy . . . Her recollection of her feelings regarding violence and being silenced are particularly resonant . . . She knows who she is and which forces have shaped her . . . [and] realizes the power of naming inequity, violence, and oppression against women.” Library Journal

“Enlightening . . . a thinking person’s book about writing, female identity, and freedom by a powerful and motivating voice for change.” Publishers Weekly
© Trent Davis Bailey
Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including the memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence and the nonfiction A Field Guide to Getting LostThe Faraway NearbyA Paradise Built in HellRiver of Shadows, and Wanderlust. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and many essays on feminism, activism and social change, hope, and the climate crisis. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a regular contributor to The Guardian and other publications. View titles by Rebecca Solnit
1

One day long ago, I looked at myself as I faced a full-length mirror and saw my image darken and soften and then seem to retreat, as though I was vanishing from the world rather than that my mind was shutting it out. I steadied myself on the door frame just across the hall from the mirror, and then my legs crumpled under me. My own image drifted away from me into darkness, as though I was only a ghost fading even from my own sight.

I blacked out occasionally and had dizzy spells often in those days, but this time was memorable because it appeared as though it wasn't that the world was vanishing from my consciousness but that I was vanishing from the world. I was the person who was vanishing and the disembodied person watching her from a distance, both and neither. In those days, I was trying to disappear and to appear, trying to be safe and to be someone, and those agendas were at often odds with each other. And I was watching myself to see if I could read in the mirror what I could be and whether I was good enough and whether all the things I'd been told about myself were true.

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 death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world," said Edgar Allan Poe, who must not have imagined it from the perspective of women who prefer to live. I was trying not to be the subject of someone else's poetry and not to get killed; I was trying to find a poetics of my own, with no maps, no guides, not much to go on. They might have been out there, but I hadn't located them yet.

The struggle to find a poetry in which your survival rather than your defeat is celebrated, perhaps to find your own voice to insist upon that, or to at least find a way to survive amidst an ethos that relishes your erasures and failures is work that many and perhaps most young women have to do. In those early years, I did not do it particularly well or clearly, but I did it ferociously.

I was often unaware of what and why I was resisting, and so my defiance was murky, incoherent, erratic. Those years of not succumbing, or of succumbing like someone sinking into a morass and then flailing to escape, again and again, come back to me now as I see young women around me fighting 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.

The director, writer, and actor Brit Marling said recently, "Part of what keeps you sitting in that chair in that room enduring harassment or abuse from a man in power is that, as a woman, you have rarely seen another end for yourself. In the novels you've read, in the films you've seen, in the stories you've been told since birth, the women so frequently meet disastrous ends."

The mirror in which I saw myself disappear was in the apartment I inhabited for a quarter century, beginning in the last months of my teens. The first several years there were the era of my fiercest battles, some of which I won, some of which left scars I still carry, many of which so formed me that I cannot say I wish that it had all been otherwise, for then I would have been someone else entirely, and she does not exist. I do. But I can wish that the young women who come after me might skip some of the old obstacles, and some of my writing has been toward that end, at least by naming those obstacles.

2

Another mirror story: When I was about eleven there was a shoe store where my mother got me the engineer boots I favored back when I was trying not to be that despised thing, a girl, and was trying to be what seemed like a separate thing, rugged, ready for action, but something else made the store memorable. If you stepped in front of the mirrors that lined both sides of the center aisle, you could see an image of an image of an image of an image of yourself or the shoe stools or anything, each one more watery and dim and remote, stretching onward, beyond, seemingly forever, as though an ocean lay in there with the reflections and you were seeing farther and farther into the sea-green depths. It wasn't the self I was trying to catch sight of then, but the beyond.

Beyond every beginning is another beginning, and another and another, but my first ride on the 5 Fulton bus could be a place to start, that line that bisects the city, running from downtown, by San Francisco Bay, all the way west out Fulton Street to the Pacific Ocean. The main thrust of this story happens in the middle of that route, in the middle of the city, but for just a moment stay on the bus straining uphill past the Jesuit church whose towers catch the morning light, onward alongside the big park on the south side of the street and avenue after avenue of houses less and less densely packed on earth that is really only sand, to that sandy stretch meeting the Pacific Ocean that covers almost a third of the planet.

Sometimes the whole sea looks like a mirror of beaten silver, though it's too turbulent to hold many reflections; it's the bay that carries a reflected sky on its surface. On the most beautiful days, there are no words for the colors of San Francisco Bay and the sky above it. Sometimes the water reflects a heaven that is both gray and gold, and the water is blue, is green, is silver, is a mirror of that gray and gold, catching the warmth and cold of colors in its ripples, is all and none of them, is something more subtle than the language we have can describe. Sometimes a bird dives into the mirror of the water, vanishing into its own reflection, and the reflective surface makes it impossible to see what lies beneath.

Sometimes at the birth and death of a day, the opal sky is no color we have words for, the gold shading into blue without the intervening green that is halfway between those colors, the fiery warm colors that are not apricot or crimson or gold, the light morphing second by second so that the sky is more shades of blue than you can count as it fades from where the sun is to the far side where other colors are happening. If you look away for a moment you miss a shade for which there will never be a term, and it is transformed into another and another. The names of the colors are sometimes cages containing what doesn't belong there, and this is often true of language generally, of the words like woman, man, child, adult, safe, strong, free, true, black, white, rich, poor. We need the words, but use them best knowing they are containers forever spilling over and breaking open. Something is always beyond.

3

Sometimes a gift is given and neither giver nor recipient knows what its true dimensions are, and what it appears to be at first is not what it will be in the end. Like beginnings, endings have endless recessions, layers atop the layers, consequences that ripple outward. One winter Sunday when I was young, ignorant, poor, and almost friendless, I went to look at an apartment for rent. I'd found the listing in the want ads of the newspaper, a few tiny lines of information in that dense gray grid, mostly describing places out of my range. People had laughed at me when I'd said I was looking for something for $200 a month, a rock-bottom price even then, but I couldn't afford any more that last semester of my undergraduate education, that third year of my financial independence.

At the time I went house hunting I lived in a tiny room with a window onto a light shaft that was nevertheless luxurious for having its own bathroom in that residential hotel whose other rooms had shared bathrooms down the hall. The entire building shared a single dimly lit kitchen where your food would be stolen from the refrigerator or swarmed over by roaches or both. The other residents were people whose lives seemed to have not turned out well. I was nineteen and my life had not turned out yet; I was still early in the process of trying to figure out who and how to become, the usual task for someone that age. (I had taken the GED at fifteen and started community college full time at sixteen, transferring to a four-year college at seventeen; at nineteen I was a senior at San Francisco State University, the working-class college out in the windy southwest corner of the city.)

I got on the 5 Fulton near City Hall and the bus took me past the housing projects, past a Fillmore Street church where a group of somber black men in suits were gathered outside for a funeral, past ornate old wooden houses and corner liquor stores, up a rise to Lyon Street, where I stepped off, and the bus lumbered on to the Pacific. I found the address, a building with a recessed front door that had, like a lot of the others nearby, an ironwork gate added for more security. The doormat inside was attached to the mail slot with a rusty chain and lock. I rang the manager's doorbell, trudged up the first flight of stairs when he buzzed me in, and met him at the doorway of his apartment on the second floor, from which he dispatched me to the third floor to see the apartment directly above his.

The place astonished me with its beauty. A corner studio whose main room had a south and an east bay window through which light cascaded. Golden oak floors, high coved ceilings, and white walls with rectangular panels of molding. Glass-paneled doors with crystal doorknobs. A separate kitchen with another east-facing window that would explode with morning light when the sun came up over the big house across the street. It seemed luminous, a little unearthly, a place from a fairy tale, immense and exquisite compared to the spartan single rooms in which I'd mostly lived since I'd left home shortly after I turned seventeen. I floated around in it for a while, then went back downstairs and told the manager I wanted it. He said, kindly, "If you want it you should have it." I wanted it passionately; it was more beautiful than anything I'd ever dreamed I could have, and being in it seemed like a dream itself.

He was a big black man of sixty, tall, stout, strong, clearly once very handsome, still an impressive figure with a low, rumbling voice, and if he was dressed that day as he was most days I knew him, he was probably wearing overalls. He brought me into his parlor. That Super Bowl Sunday afternoon when a local football team was in the game and a roar would go up from homes throughout the neighborhood with every score, he was watching black men play the blues on his big TV sitting on its own table near the six-sided green-felt poker table, the light outside filtered through old-fashioned wide-slatted blinds over his bay windows. When he handed me the rental application, my heart fell. I told him that I had already been turned down by the slumlord management company whose name was at the top of the form. One of the employees had disdainfully dropped my application into the wastebasket next to his desk while I looked on; I didn't make enough money to meet their minimums.

The building manager told me that if I got a respectable older woman to apply, he wouldn't tell them of the deception. I took up that offer and asked my mother, who had often refused to go out on a limb for me, if she would. This time she did, filling out and submitting the form. The management company was not suspicious about why a white homeowner who lived on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge wanted the apartment-I think she said something about being closer to work, because she kept the books in a talent agency in the city. They probably gave it to her by rote as the most financially impressive applicant for a small place in a black neighborhood.

For the next eight years, I paid my rent every month by buying a money order and signing her name rather than mine to it. The lease specified that the person who'd signed it be the person who lived there, so I did not officially exist in my home that was not officially mine. Though I would end up spending so many years there, I felt for a long time that I might be chased off at any time and should be as invisible as possible, which reinforced a tendency toward furtiveness, a habit of trying to go undetected, that I'd developed as a child. At some point, the property management company found out that the resident was not the signer of the lease and asked the building manager what was going on. He vouched for me as a quiet, responsible tenant, and nothing happened, but I still felt precarious.

James V. Young was the building manager's name. I always called him Mr. Young. Sometime or other he mentioned that I was the first white person to live in the building in seventeen years. The other residents were mostly older couples, though a single mother and her friendly daughter lived in another one of the studio apartments in that building, which had seven apartments opening off the stairwell on two stories, above a ground floor of garages. That I had moved into a black neighborhood was something I had not yet grasped; it would teach me many things over the years to come, and I would stay so long that when I left, I left a middle-class white place whose buildings remained largely unchanged beyond fresh paint, but where everything else was transformed and something vital had died.

I changed too; the person who moved out in the twenty-first century was not that person who'd arrived all those years before. There is a thread of continuity. The child is mother of the woman, but so much happened, so much changed, that I think of that spindly, anxious young woman as someone I knew intimately, someone I wish I could have done more for, someone I feel for as I often do for women her age whom I meet now; that long-ago girl was not exactly me, not like me at all in crucial ways, but me anyway, an awkward misfit, a daydreamer, a restless wanderer.

About

Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography
Longlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political Writing

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, from the author of Orwell's Roses


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. 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. 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.

Beyond 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. 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.

Praise

Praise for Recollections of My Nonexistence:

“Much more than a feminist manifesto . . . Solnit movingly describes her efforts to fashion ‘the self who will speak’ . . . 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.” —Katy Waldman, The New Yorker 

"At the same time that [Solnit] describes her forays into her past, she invites us to connect pieces of her story to our own, as a measure of how far we've come and how far we have left to go." —Jenny Odell, The New York Times Book Review

“Throughout her rich body of work, essayist and critic Rebecca Solnit has revealed pieces of herself in writings about the beauty of getting lost, the joys of walking both for pleasure and with purpose, and perhaps most famously, the indignity of being mansplained to. At last, she uses her eagle eye to explore her own life. Recollections of My Nonexistence is a marvel: a memoir that details her awakening as a feminist, an environmentalist, and a citizen of the world. Every single sentence is exquisite.” —Maris Kreizman, Vulture

“[A] splendid memoir of longings and determinations, of resistances and revolutions, personal and political, illuminating the kiln in which one of the boldest, most original minds of our time was annealed.” —Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

“A clarion call of a memoir, chronicling, in unfettered, poetic prose, her coming-of-age . . . and her emergence as one of our most potent cultural critics.” O, The Oprah Magazine

“A resonant and moving portrait of how challenging life can be in the female body.” Time, “100 Must-Read Books of 2020”

“A deeply intimate and deeply internal book about how Solnit became one of the defining feminist thinkers of the twenty-first century [and] a nostalgic love letter to the San Francisco of her youth . . . Solnit writes beautifully and with much compassionate nuance about how the threat of violence and not just its execution colors all parts of a woman’s life, and how actual physical violence is just one of myriad ways that women are controlled, subjugated and silenced . . . This [book] is electrifying in its precision of thought and language.”San Francisco Chronicle

“Solnit has valiantly been making the case that misogynist speech and violence are on a spectrum for decades, long before mainstream acceptance of the idea . . . In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Solnit implies that just as the illness can be both dramatic and also cumulative, gradual, and imperceptible, so might be the cure. And things that feel insufficient — writing, talking, walking, teaching — do in fact represent tiny counterweights, which together shift the course of culture.” —NPR.org

“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] 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 . . . [It] often reads as a letter to young activists and women writers—less ‘back in my day’ and more ‘I fought, and am fighting, the same battles you are.’” —Jenny Odell, The New York Times Book Review

“Solnit begins this book of personal and cultural explorations with the memory of looking in a mirror and seeing herself disappear. It’s a fitting metaphor for a narrative that is as much a social history as it is a memoir, engaging questions of invisibility and silence and the way patriarchal forces seek to render women small.” Los Angeles Times

“Solnit emphasizes the need to find poetry in survival . . . [Recollections of My Nonexistence is] a voice raised in hope against gender violence. It’s a call we should listen to.” The Washington Post

“It is a rare writer who has both the intellectual heft and the authority of frontline experience to tackle the most urgent issues of our time. One of the reasons [Solnit] has won so many admirers is the sense that she is driven not by anger but by compassion and the desire to offer encouragement . . . That voice of hope is more essential now than ever, and this memoir is a valuable glimpse into the grit and courage that enabled her to keep telling sidelined stories.”The Guardian (London)

“Tracking Solnit’s coming of age as an artist and feminist in a San Francisco that was changing just as much as she was, this memoir explores Solnit’s moral formation—and erasure—while also acting as a biography of an American city that silences women, still.” —Courtney Maum, author of The Year of the Horses

“A brilliant memoir that is at once both of the moment and timeless . . . Recollections of My Nonexistence is all about liberation. And it invites us to think more broadly about what is possible in challenging times.” —John Nichols, The Progressive

“[A] feat of exacting labor, with places from decades ago remembered in their tiny details alongside a constant, simmering anger at how those same places were ordinary war zones for women.” Vanity Fair

“A work of feminist solidarity, in which [Solnit] chooses to write not from herself alone, but ‘for and about and often with the voices of other women talking about survival’ . . . What Solnit wants most is to talk about the obstacles her younger self found . . . She’s concerned with the way women disappear, or are encouraged to abdicate their bodies and their vocation . . . [A] meditation on creativity, home, and an elusive self.” 4Columns

“[A] splendid memoir of longings and determinations, of resistances and revolutions, personal and political, illuminating the kiln in which one of the boldest, most original minds of our time was annealed.” —Maria Popova, BrainPickings

“One of the more beautiful narratives I’ve read.” —Ezra Klein, Vox

“Rebecca Solnit’s opposition to injustice in its many forms, and her relentless inquiry as a writer and reporter into a great range of issues—racial injustice, nuclear weapons, indigenous rights, male hegemony—have defined the outrage and politics of much of her generation. In Recollections of My Nonexistence she draws all these potent metaphors for inequity together into a moral stance that transcends the particulars of all her topics. This is a remarkable book—smart, brave, edgy, insightful, and authentic.” —Barry Lopez

“One of our foremost thinkers on womanhood explores the journey of her becoming in this deeply personal memoir about her youth in San Francisco. In her searing, sensitive voice, Solnit recalls the epidemic of violence against women . . . tracing her journey as a writer through her journey to speak out on behalf of women.” Esquire

“Activist and essayist Rebecca Solnit has long captured the discomforts and difficulties of modern womanhood . . . [I]n describing [her youth], she details how she found her voice as an advocate for herself and those around her.” Time

“Fantastic . . . Solnit generously offers the story of finding her voice – exemplary as it is – as just one of the tales 'waiting to be told' in feminism’s twenty-first century.” BUST

“This powerful memoir reveals how Solnit’s coming-of-age as a journalist and a woman in 1980s San Francisco shaped her as a writer and a feminist. She grapples with sexual harassment, poverty, trauma, and women’s exclusion from the cultural conversation, while discovering punk rock and the LGBTQ+ community as safe havens. Her words have long empowered people who feel voiceless, and her latest book is no exception.” Good Housekeeping

“[Solnit] couches her own lived experience . . . within a larger exploration of contemporary womanhood and an unapologetically feminist, queer lens. While beautifully exercising her own literary voice, Solnit simultaneously poses the question: Who do we allow to characterize the female experience? And what needs to happen in order for that to change?”Parade

“An inquisitive, perceptive, and original thinker and enthralling writer . . . Solnit has created an unconventional and galvanizing memoir-in-essays that shares key, often terrifying, formative moments in her valiant writing life . . . [and] illuminates with piercing lyricism the body-and-soul dangers women face in our complexly, violently misogynist world . . . [A]n incandescent addition to the literature of dissent and creativity.” —Booklist (starred)

“While misogyny and its effect on women’s psyches is familiar territory for Solnit, as in her breakthrough 2014 essay collection, Men Explain Things To Me, here the prolific writer gets more personal than ever as she reflects upon her youth in 1980s San Francisco.” AV Club

“Absorbing . . . A perceptive, radiant portrait of a writer of indelible consequence.” Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“An engaging look at Solnit’s life, which succeeds in giving voice to inequity caused by patriarchy . . . Her recollection of her feelings regarding violence and being silenced are particularly resonant . . . She knows who she is and which forces have shaped her . . . [and] realizes the power of naming inequity, violence, and oppression against women.” Library Journal

“Enlightening . . . a thinking person’s book about writing, female identity, and freedom by a powerful and motivating voice for change.” Publishers Weekly

Author

© Trent Davis Bailey
Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including the memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence and the nonfiction A Field Guide to Getting LostThe Faraway NearbyA Paradise Built in HellRiver of Shadows, and Wanderlust. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and many essays on feminism, activism and social change, hope, and the climate crisis. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a regular contributor to The Guardian and other publications. View titles by Rebecca Solnit

Excerpt

1

One day long ago, I looked at myself as I faced a full-length mirror and saw my image darken and soften and then seem to retreat, as though I was vanishing from the world rather than that my mind was shutting it out. I steadied myself on the door frame just across the hall from the mirror, and then my legs crumpled under me. My own image drifted away from me into darkness, as though I was only a ghost fading even from my own sight.

I blacked out occasionally and had dizzy spells often in those days, but this time was memorable because it appeared as though it wasn't that the world was vanishing from my consciousness but that I was vanishing from the world. I was the person who was vanishing and the disembodied person watching her from a distance, both and neither. In those days, I was trying to disappear and to appear, trying to be safe and to be someone, and those agendas were at often odds with each other. And I was watching myself to see if I could read in the mirror what I could be and whether I was good enough and whether all the things I'd been told about myself were true.

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 death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world," said Edgar Allan Poe, who must not have imagined it from the perspective of women who prefer to live. I was trying not to be the subject of someone else's poetry and not to get killed; I was trying to find a poetics of my own, with no maps, no guides, not much to go on. They might have been out there, but I hadn't located them yet.

The struggle to find a poetry in which your survival rather than your defeat is celebrated, perhaps to find your own voice to insist upon that, or to at least find a way to survive amidst an ethos that relishes your erasures and failures is work that many and perhaps most young women have to do. In those early years, I did not do it particularly well or clearly, but I did it ferociously.

I was often unaware of what and why I was resisting, and so my defiance was murky, incoherent, erratic. Those years of not succumbing, or of succumbing like someone sinking into a morass and then flailing to escape, again and again, come back to me now as I see young women around me fighting 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.

The director, writer, and actor Brit Marling said recently, "Part of what keeps you sitting in that chair in that room enduring harassment or abuse from a man in power is that, as a woman, you have rarely seen another end for yourself. In the novels you've read, in the films you've seen, in the stories you've been told since birth, the women so frequently meet disastrous ends."

The mirror in which I saw myself disappear was in the apartment I inhabited for a quarter century, beginning in the last months of my teens. The first several years there were the era of my fiercest battles, some of which I won, some of which left scars I still carry, many of which so formed me that I cannot say I wish that it had all been otherwise, for then I would have been someone else entirely, and she does not exist. I do. But I can wish that the young women who come after me might skip some of the old obstacles, and some of my writing has been toward that end, at least by naming those obstacles.

2

Another mirror story: When I was about eleven there was a shoe store where my mother got me the engineer boots I favored back when I was trying not to be that despised thing, a girl, and was trying to be what seemed like a separate thing, rugged, ready for action, but something else made the store memorable. If you stepped in front of the mirrors that lined both sides of the center aisle, you could see an image of an image of an image of an image of yourself or the shoe stools or anything, each one more watery and dim and remote, stretching onward, beyond, seemingly forever, as though an ocean lay in there with the reflections and you were seeing farther and farther into the sea-green depths. It wasn't the self I was trying to catch sight of then, but the beyond.

Beyond every beginning is another beginning, and another and another, but my first ride on the 5 Fulton bus could be a place to start, that line that bisects the city, running from downtown, by San Francisco Bay, all the way west out Fulton Street to the Pacific Ocean. The main thrust of this story happens in the middle of that route, in the middle of the city, but for just a moment stay on the bus straining uphill past the Jesuit church whose towers catch the morning light, onward alongside the big park on the south side of the street and avenue after avenue of houses less and less densely packed on earth that is really only sand, to that sandy stretch meeting the Pacific Ocean that covers almost a third of the planet.

Sometimes the whole sea looks like a mirror of beaten silver, though it's too turbulent to hold many reflections; it's the bay that carries a reflected sky on its surface. On the most beautiful days, there are no words for the colors of San Francisco Bay and the sky above it. Sometimes the water reflects a heaven that is both gray and gold, and the water is blue, is green, is silver, is a mirror of that gray and gold, catching the warmth and cold of colors in its ripples, is all and none of them, is something more subtle than the language we have can describe. Sometimes a bird dives into the mirror of the water, vanishing into its own reflection, and the reflective surface makes it impossible to see what lies beneath.

Sometimes at the birth and death of a day, the opal sky is no color we have words for, the gold shading into blue without the intervening green that is halfway between those colors, the fiery warm colors that are not apricot or crimson or gold, the light morphing second by second so that the sky is more shades of blue than you can count as it fades from where the sun is to the far side where other colors are happening. If you look away for a moment you miss a shade for which there will never be a term, and it is transformed into another and another. The names of the colors are sometimes cages containing what doesn't belong there, and this is often true of language generally, of the words like woman, man, child, adult, safe, strong, free, true, black, white, rich, poor. We need the words, but use them best knowing they are containers forever spilling over and breaking open. Something is always beyond.

3

Sometimes a gift is given and neither giver nor recipient knows what its true dimensions are, and what it appears to be at first is not what it will be in the end. Like beginnings, endings have endless recessions, layers atop the layers, consequences that ripple outward. One winter Sunday when I was young, ignorant, poor, and almost friendless, I went to look at an apartment for rent. I'd found the listing in the want ads of the newspaper, a few tiny lines of information in that dense gray grid, mostly describing places out of my range. People had laughed at me when I'd said I was looking for something for $200 a month, a rock-bottom price even then, but I couldn't afford any more that last semester of my undergraduate education, that third year of my financial independence.

At the time I went house hunting I lived in a tiny room with a window onto a light shaft that was nevertheless luxurious for having its own bathroom in that residential hotel whose other rooms had shared bathrooms down the hall. The entire building shared a single dimly lit kitchen where your food would be stolen from the refrigerator or swarmed over by roaches or both. The other residents were people whose lives seemed to have not turned out well. I was nineteen and my life had not turned out yet; I was still early in the process of trying to figure out who and how to become, the usual task for someone that age. (I had taken the GED at fifteen and started community college full time at sixteen, transferring to a four-year college at seventeen; at nineteen I was a senior at San Francisco State University, the working-class college out in the windy southwest corner of the city.)

I got on the 5 Fulton near City Hall and the bus took me past the housing projects, past a Fillmore Street church where a group of somber black men in suits were gathered outside for a funeral, past ornate old wooden houses and corner liquor stores, up a rise to Lyon Street, where I stepped off, and the bus lumbered on to the Pacific. I found the address, a building with a recessed front door that had, like a lot of the others nearby, an ironwork gate added for more security. The doormat inside was attached to the mail slot with a rusty chain and lock. I rang the manager's doorbell, trudged up the first flight of stairs when he buzzed me in, and met him at the doorway of his apartment on the second floor, from which he dispatched me to the third floor to see the apartment directly above his.

The place astonished me with its beauty. A corner studio whose main room had a south and an east bay window through which light cascaded. Golden oak floors, high coved ceilings, and white walls with rectangular panels of molding. Glass-paneled doors with crystal doorknobs. A separate kitchen with another east-facing window that would explode with morning light when the sun came up over the big house across the street. It seemed luminous, a little unearthly, a place from a fairy tale, immense and exquisite compared to the spartan single rooms in which I'd mostly lived since I'd left home shortly after I turned seventeen. I floated around in it for a while, then went back downstairs and told the manager I wanted it. He said, kindly, "If you want it you should have it." I wanted it passionately; it was more beautiful than anything I'd ever dreamed I could have, and being in it seemed like a dream itself.

He was a big black man of sixty, tall, stout, strong, clearly once very handsome, still an impressive figure with a low, rumbling voice, and if he was dressed that day as he was most days I knew him, he was probably wearing overalls. He brought me into his parlor. That Super Bowl Sunday afternoon when a local football team was in the game and a roar would go up from homes throughout the neighborhood with every score, he was watching black men play the blues on his big TV sitting on its own table near the six-sided green-felt poker table, the light outside filtered through old-fashioned wide-slatted blinds over his bay windows. When he handed me the rental application, my heart fell. I told him that I had already been turned down by the slumlord management company whose name was at the top of the form. One of the employees had disdainfully dropped my application into the wastebasket next to his desk while I looked on; I didn't make enough money to meet their minimums.

The building manager told me that if I got a respectable older woman to apply, he wouldn't tell them of the deception. I took up that offer and asked my mother, who had often refused to go out on a limb for me, if she would. This time she did, filling out and submitting the form. The management company was not suspicious about why a white homeowner who lived on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge wanted the apartment-I think she said something about being closer to work, because she kept the books in a talent agency in the city. They probably gave it to her by rote as the most financially impressive applicant for a small place in a black neighborhood.

For the next eight years, I paid my rent every month by buying a money order and signing her name rather than mine to it. The lease specified that the person who'd signed it be the person who lived there, so I did not officially exist in my home that was not officially mine. Though I would end up spending so many years there, I felt for a long time that I might be chased off at any time and should be as invisible as possible, which reinforced a tendency toward furtiveness, a habit of trying to go undetected, that I'd developed as a child. At some point, the property management company found out that the resident was not the signer of the lease and asked the building manager what was going on. He vouched for me as a quiet, responsible tenant, and nothing happened, but I still felt precarious.

James V. Young was the building manager's name. I always called him Mr. Young. Sometime or other he mentioned that I was the first white person to live in the building in seventeen years. The other residents were mostly older couples, though a single mother and her friendly daughter lived in another one of the studio apartments in that building, which had seven apartments opening off the stairwell on two stories, above a ground floor of garages. That I had moved into a black neighborhood was something I had not yet grasped; it would teach me many things over the years to come, and I would stay so long that when I left, I left a middle-class white place whose buildings remained largely unchanged beyond fresh paint, but where everything else was transformed and something vital had died.

I changed too; the person who moved out in the twenty-first century was not that person who'd arrived all those years before. There is a thread of continuity. The child is mother of the woman, but so much happened, so much changed, that I think of that spindly, anxious young woman as someone I knew intimately, someone I wish I could have done more for, someone I feel for as I often do for women her age whom I meet now; that long-ago girl was not exactly me, not like me at all in crucial ways, but me anyway, an awkward misfit, a daydreamer, a restless wanderer.