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theangrystackrat's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
medium-paced
3.0
painalangoisse's review against another edition
5.0
I find Solnit's writing to be incomparably gorgeous. I eagerly anticipated reading this book as she was already among my favorite authors, though that description fails to even approach encompassing the feelings I have for her work. If Atwood and Sontag inspire me to be a sharper person, Solnit encourages me to be better. Some thoughts on what precisely works in her memoir, at the risk of sounding like a high school essay:
-The prose itself: it's elegant, it's consistent (with itself and its content - a wonderful example of style contributing to meaning), it's uniquely hers. It's lyrical; it pulled me in and guided me through. Solnit has a gift for extracting poetic figurative meanings from disparate quotes and ideas.
-The structure complements the ideas well. The short chapters give focus; division into sections highlights the chronology of her life and ideas. I also love the way she uses motifs in exploring what has and hasn't changed over time.
-What annoys me most in a memoir is the assumption that the author's experiences are unique, or uniquely interesting. What annoys me most in feminist thought is the assumption that the author's experiences are universal (at least among women). Solnit avoids both pitfalls beautifully and in a way I've never seen before - she has a way of inviting identification without mandating it. Through this approach, I felt encouraged to consider my experiences through different lenses. It is this quality that makes this a five-star book.
One quote that I found particularly salient was "I discovered that scathing and mocking reviews were the easiest and most fun kind to write." I've felt compelled to write most reviews I have because I felt so disappointed by the work at hand. Articulating what you love about something is difficult, and so much more personal. I felt compelled to review this book before I was even halfway done with it. I don't think I've come close to doing it justice. I highly recommend anyone read it.
-The prose itself: it's elegant, it's consistent (with itself and its content - a wonderful example of style contributing to meaning), it's uniquely hers. It's lyrical; it pulled me in and guided me through. Solnit has a gift for extracting poetic figurative meanings from disparate quotes and ideas.
-The structure complements the ideas well. The short chapters give focus; division into sections highlights the chronology of her life and ideas. I also love the way she uses motifs in exploring what has and hasn't changed over time.
-What annoys me most in a memoir is the assumption that the author's experiences are unique, or uniquely interesting. What annoys me most in feminist thought is the assumption that the author's experiences are universal (at least among women). Solnit avoids both pitfalls beautifully and in a way I've never seen before - she has a way of inviting identification without mandating it. Through this approach, I felt encouraged to consider my experiences through different lenses. It is this quality that makes this a five-star book.
One quote that I found particularly salient was "I discovered that scathing and mocking reviews were the easiest and most fun kind to write." I've felt compelled to write most reviews I have because I felt so disappointed by the work at hand. Articulating what you love about something is difficult, and so much more personal. I felt compelled to review this book before I was even halfway done with it. I don't think I've come close to doing it justice. I highly recommend anyone read it.
cecirigby's review against another edition
5.0
It’s amazing how someone who writes with such expert precision can fit so much life and light and beauty into collections of words. I’ve never felt such kinship with a stranger; I’m continually awed by Solnit and am never the same person I was before reading one of her works.
jwinchell's review against another edition
4.0
I recommend this to lovers of Solnit's other work - Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, A Paradise Built in Hell. I would not recommend this as an introduction to her writing, even though the purpose of this book is to dial it back to her young adult beginnings in a sunny apartment in San Francisco where she grew into her feminism and experienced nonexistence as a woman in a misogynistic, patriarchal, dangerous world. She recollects her formative years in the gay community, the arts, in her neighborhood, traveling in the West, always writing, always working to understand the ways in which men try to erase women. She writes up to Me Too. I like the way Solnit is always conscious of racism and heterosexism while she is calling out sexism. There is an intersectionality to her consciousness about gender.
I dog eared many pages while I read. I love the way Solnit turns a phrase. Here are some standouts.
"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."
"But the desk I sit at is a desk given to me by a woman who a man tried to murder, and it seems time to tell what it meant to me to grow up in a society in which many preferred people like me to be dead or silent and how I got a voice and how it eventually came time to use that voice--that voice that was most articulate at the desk speaking through my fingers, silently--to try to tell the stories that had gone untold."
"All the worst things that happened to other women because they were women could happen to you because you were a woman."
"I tell all this not because I think my story is exceptional, but because it is ordinary; half the earth is paved over with women's fear and pain, or rather with the denial of them, and until the stories that lie beneath see sunlight, this will not change.
"You are in your youth walking down a long road that will branch and branch again, and your life is full of choices with huge and unpredictable consequences, and you rarely get to come back to choose the other route. You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail, a little, a lot, miserably, fatally."
"I have no regrets about the roads I took, but a little nostalgia for that period when most of the route is ahead, for that stage in which you might become many things that is so much the promise of youth, now that I have chosen and chosen again and again and am far down one road and far past many others."
"I tell all this not because I think my story is exceptional, but because it is ordinary; half the earth is paved over with women's fear and pain, or rather with the denial of them, and until the stories that lie underneath see sunlight, this will not change. I tell this to note that we cannot imagine what an earth without this ordinary, ubiquitous damage would look like, but that I suspect it would be dazzlingly alive and that a joyous confidence now rare would be so common, and a weight would be taken off half the population that has made many other things more difficult to impossible."
"All the worst things that happened to other women because they were women could happen to you because you were a woman."
"And so there I was where so many young women were, trying to locate ourselves somewhere between being disdained or shut out for being unattractive and being menaced or resented for being attractive, to however between two zones of punishment in space that was itself so thin that perhaps it never existed, trying to find some impossible balance of being desirable to those we desired and being safe from those we did not."
"At least books belonged to me." (this is going in my email signature)
About reading: "The sheer pleasure of meeting new voices and ideas and possibilities, having the world become more coherent in some subtle or enormous way, extending or filling in your map of the universe, is not nearly celebrated enough, nor is the beauty in finding pattern and meaning. But these awakenings recur, and every time they do there's joy."
"When I read, I ceased to be myself, and this nonexistence I pursued and devoured like a drug. I faded into an absent witness, someone who was in that world but not anyone in it, or who was every word and road and house and ill omen and forlorn hope. I was anyone and no one and nothing and everywhere in those hours and years lost in books."
"Also it seems safe to say I'm damaged and a member of a society that damages us all and damages women in particular ways."
I dog eared many pages while I read. I love the way Solnit turns a phrase. Here are some standouts.
"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."
"But the desk I sit at is a desk given to me by a woman who a man tried to murder, and it seems time to tell what it meant to me to grow up in a society in which many preferred people like me to be dead or silent and how I got a voice and how it eventually came time to use that voice--that voice that was most articulate at the desk speaking through my fingers, silently--to try to tell the stories that had gone untold."
"All the worst things that happened to other women because they were women could happen to you because you were a woman."
"I tell all this not because I think my story is exceptional, but because it is ordinary; half the earth is paved over with women's fear and pain, or rather with the denial of them, and until the stories that lie beneath see sunlight, this will not change.
"You are in your youth walking down a long road that will branch and branch again, and your life is full of choices with huge and unpredictable consequences, and you rarely get to come back to choose the other route. You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail, a little, a lot, miserably, fatally."
"I have no regrets about the roads I took, but a little nostalgia for that period when most of the route is ahead, for that stage in which you might become many things that is so much the promise of youth, now that I have chosen and chosen again and again and am far down one road and far past many others."
"I tell all this not because I think my story is exceptional, but because it is ordinary; half the earth is paved over with women's fear and pain, or rather with the denial of them, and until the stories that lie underneath see sunlight, this will not change. I tell this to note that we cannot imagine what an earth without this ordinary, ubiquitous damage would look like, but that I suspect it would be dazzlingly alive and that a joyous confidence now rare would be so common, and a weight would be taken off half the population that has made many other things more difficult to impossible."
"All the worst things that happened to other women because they were women could happen to you because you were a woman."
"And so there I was where so many young women were, trying to locate ourselves somewhere between being disdained or shut out for being unattractive and being menaced or resented for being attractive, to however between two zones of punishment in space that was itself so thin that perhaps it never existed, trying to find some impossible balance of being desirable to those we desired and being safe from those we did not."
"At least books belonged to me." (this is going in my email signature)
About reading: "The sheer pleasure of meeting new voices and ideas and possibilities, having the world become more coherent in some subtle or enormous way, extending or filling in your map of the universe, is not nearly celebrated enough, nor is the beauty in finding pattern and meaning. But these awakenings recur, and every time they do there's joy."
"When I read, I ceased to be myself, and this nonexistence I pursued and devoured like a drug. I faded into an absent witness, someone who was in that world but not anyone in it, or who was every word and road and house and ill omen and forlorn hope. I was anyone and no one and nothing and everywhere in those hours and years lost in books."
"Also it seems safe to say I'm damaged and a member of a society that damages us all and damages women in particular ways."
veecaswell's review against another edition
4.0
Recollections of My Non-Existence is the foundational story of an emerging artist struggling against patriarchal violence and scorn. Recalling the experience of living with fear, which Solnit contends is the normal state of women, she considers how oppression impacts on creativity and recounts the struggle to find a voice and have it be heard.
From the start I walk to talk about how Solnit can paint a scene so beautifully. How she describes what she sees and how she feels throughout this book makes me really appreciate her writing so much - her use of words here really allows you to fall into her writing throughout this book and it makes for such captivating reading.
In this writing she captures her life, the American West and San Francisco historically so beautifully. How she writes what she has experienced throughout the book is sadly common but still continues to pull you in. Going from the harassment on the street she endured to how she wrote her essay ‘Men Explain Things To Me’, this book trully allows Solnit’s voice and others to really stand out - her style is unique and keeps you pulled in.
Another great book from Solnit, her writing and how she delivers every word still stands out as one of the best out there right now.