REBECCA SOLNIT WINDOWS

In the absence of introspection or of a detailed account of her early life, Solnit tells the story of male violence. 'I wanted to trace the lost patterns that came before the world was broken' This may be true, but it doesn’t tell us much about Solnit. As always with Solnit, though, this becomes part of a larger political point, because she thinks, rightly, that though male violence affected her “in profoundly personal ways” the cure wasn’t a personal one but rather the public sea-change brought about by feminism.

And she describes how this desire to escape coexisted with fantasies of daring combat and a preoccupation with armour. She associates this, intriguingly, with her love of reading, suggesting that when she read, she “ceased to be myself, and this non-existence I pursued and devoured like a drug”. She suggests that, partly because of her violent father, she became “expert at fading and slipping and sneaking away … dodging unwanted hugs and kisses and hands … at the art of non-existence, since existence was so perilous”. “To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways,” she writes at the start, “or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once.” There’s a personal point here.

Solnit’s title is in part an acknowledgement of this, and some of the book’s most striking passages are about non-existence. There is not here the plunge inwards, the giddying rush of embodied thinking, that we get in, say, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. She’s not curious about the relationship between thoughts and feelings or about her own ambivalence or contradictions. But this book feels a little thin, because she’s not an introspective writer. And her take on culture is original enough that it wouldn’t be surprising if her take on memoir was original too. She has always used her own experience, describing herself walking across cities and deserts, or evading the violence or speechifying of men. There’s a lot of first person writing across Solnit’s books. Recollections of My Non-Existence announces itself as a memoir that will reveal how this skinny, friendless girl found her voice and her place in the world. She didn’t yet know that she was a feminist or a writer but she knew that she was a reader and that she was outraged by the expectations of the men around her, whether it was the male poets seeking a muse or the men who followed her in the street, making her panic that she could end up as one of the women she read about in news reports: “beatnik girl slain by sailor looking for love”. She filled the space with things collected on walks – lichen-covered twigs, birds’ nests, bones – and with old furniture and books.

REBECCA SOLNIT WINDOWS

She found in the corner studio in Lyon Street, with its light-filled bay windows and golden oak floors, the beginnings of an adult identity. She’d been living in hostels since she moved away from her parents a few years earlier, so this was the first room of her own. O ne Sunday in 1980, the 19-year-old Rebecca Solnit went to see the studio flat in San Francisco that would be her home for the next 26 years.

Rebecca solnit