Rebecca Solnit’sRecollections of My Non-Existence provides a deft answer to the quandaries of memoir writing as well as a fierce response to the questions of how to live authentically,even defiantly,as a woman in a man’s world.
Solnit is best known as the author ofMen Explain Things To Me,an ironic essay on the phenomenon she coined the phrase for:‘‘mansplaining.’’
The essay dryly recounts how she listened,at first curious then amused,as a man explained to her an important new book highlighted in a prominent weekly – which turned out to be her own book on the subject,unbeknown to him.
Rebecca Solnit's memoir is ironic and intimate.
From this,you can already see her idea of female non-existence shaping up.
To be a prominent feminist is an achievement and to be a strong feminist one a la Roxanne Gay is even better. Solnit is also a Susan Sontag-style critic in the mode. She has written 17 books,is a contributing editor toHarper’s and has been dubbed ‘‘the voice of the resistance’’ by The New York Times.
Solnit comes from San Francisco and shows an explorative intelligence shaped by that city. She knows how race shapes poverty as well as gentrification,not to mention what feeds into punk music,gay liberation or opposition to the war in Iraq. She even started out at City Lights bookshop,and she describes encounters with the bookseller and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
But Solnit’s story contains reflections and adventures to show how as a critic she is also the creation of her own will,the way she’s met the world head-on and refused to accept the status quo.
In sentences of lucid and luminous lyricism (arresting and strong just like the image she proffers of a featherbone cloudscape),Solnit reflects on the pleasures and paradoxes of becoming an adult in the fuller soulful sense,which she distinguishes from the arbitrary business of just getting to a certain age. Solnit captures the irony of having to grow up quickly,only to find the joy of being child-like playful in her reading.
One of the hidden treasures in this rich,inviting act of remembering is Solnit’s experience of working in a gallery,among the Matisses and Miros,even x-raying a painting by the German expressionist Franz Marc to show the skeleton underneath it.
And yes,Solnit’s memoir takes us aback with her intimacies as well as her ironies. She touches us with her dreams of flying,which she sees as metaphors for reading and writing,two ways of moving without restriction through worlds of existential confinement she keeps going back to,but always in the quest for freedom and being her own person. Her preoccupation with violence against women can be confronting in a book that gives so much pleasure to the reader:male violence under the patriarchy is a bit like the skeletal outline under that painting Solnit restored,the hard bones beneath seductive body.
But it’s bodies in motion that Solnit seems to love. She speaks with authority about moving in dangerous neighbourhoods unscathed,and how she escaped a childhood where the threat of violence was always present. And it says something for Solnit’s status as that rare thing,a genuine public intellectual,that the anecdotes from her past experience are sparing and retain their validity and dignity. There is no attempt to exploit her experience,or indulge in selling her own achievement in transcending the limitations of her world as a kind of vulgar success. She believes wounds matter along with freedoms.
The last movement of the book summons the Japanese art of kintsugi or golden repair,the practice of soldering broken ceramics with gold so that the faultlines of a break stay visible and are celebrated. Solnit sees writing as a way of celebrating a fractured world we are obliged to fix with whatever gold we can find. It’s to Solnit’s credit in this elegant book that she can bear comparison,as a writer,with the aesthetic salvaging she describes.