Recollections of My Nonexistence

A Memoir

By: Rebecca Solnit

Narrated by: Rebecca Solnit

Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins

Publisher's summary

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 19, 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.

©2020 Rebecca Solnit (P)2020 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“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