Scan barcode
A review by justabean_reads
Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit
4.5
I started this a couple times over the years, and found the first chapter a little floaty and hard to engage with, but this time I stuck with it, and ended up really enjoying the book as a whole. It's less a memoir in a strictly biographical sense, and more a series of meditations on the forces that shaped Solnit's activism, philosophy, and creative life. I liked how much she talked about community, and support from other artists and thinkers, learning via activism around women's rights, gay rights and environmentalism. The whole it takes a village to build a philosophy view made a lot of sense to me, as did the descriptions of how people's views change and evolve as they themselves do, as the world does.
A lot of the book is about gendered violence and Solnit's growing understanding of feminism, and how the movement has changed since she became involved with it. There are a couple chapters early in I was mentally calling, Dessa's "Fire Drills": The Memoir as they discuss the way the patriarchy chokes out life and shuts down possibilities. It also reminded me of the Marjorie M. Liu comment about how Wonder Woman is difficult to adapt because society cannot contemplate what might be possible or what might be undone if a woman was given the power that men imagine daily for themselves. So much of Solnit's work has been about imagining exactly that, and trying to bring it into the world. And I already don't entirely recognise the society she describes growing up in, even though we're only a generation apart.
A lot of the book is about gendered violence and Solnit's growing understanding of feminism, and how the movement has changed since she became involved with it. There are a couple chapters early in I was mentally calling, Dessa's "Fire Drills": The Memoir as they discuss the way the patriarchy chokes out life and shuts down possibilities. It also reminded me of the Marjorie M. Liu comment about how Wonder Woman is difficult to adapt because society cannot contemplate what might be possible or what might be undone if a woman was given the power that men imagine daily for themselves. So much of Solnit's work has been about imagining exactly that, and trying to bring it into the world. And I already don't entirely recognise the society she describes growing up in, even though we're only a generation apart.