"Someone tried to silence her," Solnit writes. The friend survived her ex was never prosecuted. It was given to her by a friend, who had recently been "stabbed fifteen times by an ex-boyfriend to punish her for leaving him," she writes. Solnit opens her new book, Recollections of My Nonexistence, which examines these forces and the ways that women work to counter them, with a description of a Victorian writing desk. "I like incidents of that sort," Solnit writes, "when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that's eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet." When this fact is finally, effortfully, conveyed to him, he went "ashen." The man then held forth about this book for several minutes before Solnit realized he was talking about her book.
"And have you heard about the very importantMuybridge book that came out this year?" he asked. 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.In her now famous essay, "Men Explain Things to Me," Rebecca Solnit describes a party in a ski chalet, at which she told the owner of the chalet that she had just written a book about the photographer Eadweard Muybridge. 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.īeyond 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. 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 nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself.
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.
Longlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political WritingĪn 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 Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography
0 kommentar(er)
