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A review by jwinchell
Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir by Rebecca Solnit
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."