Recollections of My Nonexistence

Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir
Rebecca Solnit
Viking (March 10, 2020), 252 pages
Kindle edition $13.99, Amazon hardcover $21.93

I had seen multiple references to this book in various places before reading the review in the New York Times Book Review. Based on that discussion of the book I knew that Recollections of My Nonexistence was something that I needed to read.

Solnit had me hooked in the first chapter. As one who has crossed the Golden Gate Bridge many times, I was captivated by her description of the bay.

On the most beautiful days, there are no words for the colors of San Francisco Bay and the sky above it. Sometimes the water reflects a heaven that is both gray and gold, and the water is blue, is green, is silver, is a mirror of that gray and gold, catching the warmth and cold of colors in its ripples, is all and none of them, is something more subtle than the language we have.

She also writes about an apartment she rented early in her adult life: “In that little apartment I found a home in which to metamorphose, a place to stay while I changed and made a place in the world beyond.” That evoked memories of a tiny one-bedroom cottage behind a single-family house that I rented for a year after the sudden, unexpected death of my first wife. “A home in which to metamorphose, a place to stay while I changed” it was indeed.

Finally, she describes a writing desk given her by a friend fleeing an abusive relationship, a desk on which she still composes her work today. I own a desk that I obtained (I was not exactly given it, but that is a story in its own right) from a friend in my post-graduation mid-1970’s Claremont days. She was fleeing a failed relationship, and that desk that even today is at the center of my home office environment.

And that was just the first chapter.

Solnit writes about the physical danger women often experience, about her political activism, about the condescension men often display towards women, and about working to impart the importance of feminism to a younger generation of women. She wrote an essay entitled “Men Explain Things to Me,” which later became the title essay of a book. It was a that essay which inspired a reader to coin the term “mansplaining.”

If that word was the only thing Solnit ever contributed to our society and culture (and it is far from the only thing) it would be enough to earn her a place in the pantheon of progressive thinkers who have made a difference in our world.