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4.22 AVERAGE
4.22 AVERAGE
challenging
emotional
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
I struggled with this book because it really made me think and feel. Although I’m not an artist or writer and I don’t exist in the artistic and intellectual spaces she does, what she discusses as her experience as a woman so captures mine. It hurt so much at times to read her words that I had to step away from the book. And it hurts even more so given our political climate. But it’s an incredibly important work. She is brilliant and her writing is gorgeous.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Bullying, Child abuse, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Rape, Sexism, Sexual violence, Grief, Abandonment, Colonisation
reflective
medium-paced
Beautiful prose and several great nuggets of wisdom, but I was looking for more of a memoir and instead this felt like an essay lacking specific
“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.”
3.5
3.5
An excellent read. I was less interested in the stories of Solnit's life, but the feminist and socio-political portions were fascinating. Adding Men Explain Things To Me to my TBR, I think I will like it more.
Someone loaned me a copy of Rebecca Solnit's 'Men Explain Things to Me' a few years ago and I fell in love with her writing style and way of viewing things.
Her latest, 'Recollections of My Nonexistence: a Memoir' is another seemingly simple look at her writer-ly origins upon moving to San Francisco in 1981, but upon closer look she tears apart how humans, particularly women, look at the world and Solnit does it one beautiful sentence after another.
She reflects on the desk where she writes (given to her by a friend who survived a horrific stabbing from her estranged lover and was never prosecuted for this attack). She again observes gender politics and my favorite part of her memoir was located in her acknowledgments where among the many people she thanks for helping her publish this tome--- she writes, "Thank you to the handsome bikers at the Denny's on the I-5 north of Los Angeles who listened and let me convince them that Anita Hill was telling the truth, one morning at a shared table in October 1991."
Now I need to catch up on her backlist of books.
Her latest, 'Recollections of My Nonexistence: a Memoir' is another seemingly simple look at her writer-ly origins upon moving to San Francisco in 1981, but upon closer look she tears apart how humans, particularly women, look at the world and Solnit does it one beautiful sentence after another.
She reflects on the desk where she writes (given to her by a friend who survived a horrific stabbing from her estranged lover and was never prosecuted for this attack). She again observes gender politics and my favorite part of her memoir was located in her acknowledgments where among the many people she thanks for helping her publish this tome--- she writes, "Thank you to the handsome bikers at the Denny's on the I-5 north of Los Angeles who listened and let me convince them that Anita Hill was telling the truth, one morning at a shared table in October 1991."
Now I need to catch up on her backlist of books.
I really enjoyed this book. Given that I read it among books on antiracism and works by Black authors, I appreciate how Solnit regularly grounded her experience as white and female and spoke to the oppression and diminishing of indigenous and Black people in these conversations about power. There were times when she wrote with nostalgia of poverty and her own gentrification of a Black neighborhood in San Francisco. She seems to be trying to own her whiteness and privilege, but there were times that this kind of romanticizing troubled me. Overall, still a worthwhile book that is feminist and made me consider things I’ve never thought about before.
hopeful
reflective
slow-paced
I didn’t jive with the meandering writing style but there were a handful of excerpts that really resonated with me. A decent read touching on some very important topics
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
This was a nice book to engage with as one of my last reads of the year. Solnit weaves some of her own personal reflections about feminism and growing up with a more formal memoir about her writing towards the end of the book. This almost feels like it was originally meant for two different books but ended up blending together because the themes overlapped so much. Still a good read to engage with over the last 48 hours, and to get me in the headspace for a new year.