Review of Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit

This was a birthday gift for a friend who is a fierce feminist. She lent me Men Explain Things to Me so many years ago, and when I was pondering what book to buy her for her birthday, Rebecca Solnit came to mind. I was delighted to discover Solnit had penned a memoir. My friend is in between my age and Solnit’s, and so I am curious to hear her thoughts on Solnit’s reflections of coming of age in the late seventies and how that compares to her youth a couple decades later. As someone who came of age in the 2000s, I was struck, as I often am by memoirs of Solnit’s generation, by the bohemian sense of wanderlust present in these pages.

Recollections of My Nonexistence is a memoir only in the loosest sense of the word. If you are looking for something more autobiographical, you’ll be disappointed: Solnit provides only the barest glimpses into the overall chronology of her life here, with little mention of her childhood, teens, or her career at all. She focuses instead on place and space, on relationalities. This is valid, by the way, and not a criticism on my part (we will get to those!), yet something I wanted to point out up front. Much like the book’s title, its chapters are themselves more notable for how much time Solnit spends not talking about herself.

Or rather, Solnit meditates on the intersections of art, politics, writing, and feminism—and how her entire life has been spent trying to find voice amid violence:

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 when I was alone at my desk speaking through my fingers, silently….

This passage from an early chapter speaks to me for so many reasons. First and most trivially … as an editor I really want to just reach into that sentence and deconstruct it because, wow, Solnit’s stream-of-consciousness style is a bit painful for me to read. I think that’s a large part why I struggled to embrace this book more despite so appreciating its thesis.

Second, this passage speaks to why I personally believe feminism is so important. Despite the gains women have made, despite the freedoms some of us experience (albeit perhaps in limited, uneven ways) … fundamentally, we still live under patriarchy and under the threat of male violence. Our individual social capital has increased, yet our society has not actually fundamentally changed—if anything, the successes wrought by the capitalist arm of late-second- and third-wave feminism mean that we more often blame women (i.e., through slut shaming or victim blaming) when men silence them. So, Solnit’s words resonate deeply within me, despite being a trans woman thirty years her junior: women’s self-expression remains curtailed, limited, and always at threat.

Solnit connects this idea in an interesting way to her embodiment as a woman, the way she moves through the world. She alludes to her book on walking (which I haven’t read), essentially comparing her challenges with walking solo as a woman to being a woman writer—in both pursuits, her autonomy is curtailed not by law or even culture but by the omnipresent spectre of violence against women, whether it’s physical violence or misogyny disguised as critique.

The final chapter of the book, written prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, connects dots that were apparent even back then. Reading it in 2025, it’s tempting to call Solnit prescient when it comes to the rise of authoritarianism in the US—but I think it’s more the case that she’s simply reading the writing on the wall. She has seen this play out before, with Reagan and AIDS, with Bush and Iraq, and she’s less sounding an alarm as saying, “Here we go again.” There is a fatigue in her words, and while she is not defeated nor discouraged, she is frustrated that so little actual progress seems to have been made.

I’m frustrated too!

I’d give this book a higher rating but for some things that made it less enjoyable. As I mentioned earlier, Solnit’s prose is lyrical and extemporaneous in a way that doesn’t work for me. Additionally, as much as I agree with what she says here, I also don’t feel like I learned all that much. The insights I sought didn’t materialize. Solnit is an incredibly powerful writer, quite skilled at getting her message across—but it didn’t feel like a message I hadn’t heard before.

Recollections of My Nonexistence has its interesting moments. In particular, I think most women will be recognize in Solnit’s experiences some of their own confrontations with our society’s misogyny and hostility towards women. At the same time, it doesn’t deliver the kind of wisdom I was hoping for. Maybe that’s on me and my expectations though.