Recollections of My Non-Existence by Rebecca Solnit

The essayist Rebecca Solnit opens her memoir with an emblematic image: a picture of her writing desk, a dainty Victorian vanity given to her by a friend who nearly bled to death after being stabbed by an ex-boyfriend. The desk has given rise to “millions of words”, many of them calling out misogyny in its various forms — from social slights to femicide.

Although also active in political and environmental causes, Solnit is best known for her feminist essays, collected in slim anthologies — most recently Whose Story Is This? (2019). Her memoir, Recollections of My Non-Existence, centres on one of her principal preoccupations: the pervasive effacement of women.

Solnit recounts the terror of walking the streets of 1980s San Francisco as a young woman, for fear of violence and the disturbing eroticisation of violence in the media and art at that time. Her early work evolved in tandem with her own self-development — “the heroic task of becoming”— as she had to overcome not only sexism in publishing but the conditioning of women to minimise themselves to stay safe (and desirable). “In those days, I was trying to disappear and to appear . . . and those agendas were at often odds with each other.”

Out of force of habit, perhaps, the book is more essayistic than biographical. While memoirists are often criticised for navel gazing, Solnit is more at ease depicting exterior landscapes. She paints a picture of a gentrifying San Francisco in broad strokes — with its gay community decimated by Aids and minority neighbourhoods displaced by the tech boom.

Her mission to make women heard was motivated in part by personal experience: “I grew up around a lot of male violence and a deeply misogynistic environment,” she told the FT in 2018. She bypasses the painful chapter of growing up with an abusive father, however, by starting the story when she leaves home. “I’m uninterested in the brutalities of childhood in part because that species has been so dwelt upon,” she explains, “while some of the brutalities that come after have not.”

While violence against women was treated as an isolated occurrence, she ‘connected the dots’

Solnit has been a leading voice in documenting those brutalities. She wrote a cover story on violence against women in a punk magazine in 1985 and has consistently sounded the klaxon ever since. While the culture at large was treating such incidents as isolated occurrences, she “connected the dots, saw an epidemic, talked and wrote about the patterns [she] saw, waited three decades for it to become a public conversation”.

She has also raised awareness of more subtle forms of silencing — articulating the phenomenon of “mansplaining” in the breakout 2008 essay “Men Explain Things to Me”, although it was in fact an online commentator who coined the portmanteau term.

While being an inspiration to women galvanised by the online outpouring of #YesAllWomen and #MeToo, Solnit has come under fire from some feminists who deem storytelling to be insufficient in the absence of structural change. Women have been sharing stories of abuse since the consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s, they argue. “If telling these stories had the power to change the way women are treated, why do we still have so many stories to tell?” asked journalist Moira Donegan in a 2017 piece in The New Yorker.

Seemingly in response to such criticism, Solnit reiterates her confidence that culture can shape politics, pointing to the evolution in equal rights that she has witnessed in her lifetime. She was born into a world in which women were still legally at the mercy of their husbands and before terms such as “acquaintance rape” and “sexual harassment” existed. But while the guilty verdict in the criminal case against Harvey Weinstein would seem to be a win against his mechanisms for muting his victims, the idea that the “conviction is a watershed is optimistic”, Solnit recently wrote in the New York Times. Sexual violence “is still harming millions directly”.

As she writes in her book, the story of women worldwide securing equal “audibility, credibility and consequence” continues.

Recollections of My Non-Existence, by Rebecca Solnit, Viking, RRP$26/Granta, RRP£16.99, 246 pages

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