Looking Backward: On the Peculiar Thinness of Rebecca Solnit’s "Recollections of My Nonexistence"

Rebecca Solnit | Recollections of My Nonexistence | Viking | March 2020 | 256 Pages

It would be an understatement to say that readers have been eagerly awaiting Rebecca Solnit’s newest memoir. Celebrated as an activist, historian, and feminist writer, Solnit has become a household name for self-proclaimed ‘woke’ readers across social media, her name a byword for clever and engagée criticism that tends to be mercilessly up-to-date. An extreme contemporaneity is a hallmark of her output; since 2014, she has published nine books, many of them essay collections that function as direct responses to the current political climate and major crises in the liberal community, like the #MeToo movement and the 2016 election. For someone who seems to live so voraciously in the present moment, it is interesting to see her turning her gaze backwards.

“Beyond every beginning is another beginning, and another and another,” Solnit writes in her newest memoir.  For a writer who has led many lives, Recollections of My Nonexistence marks a return to Solnit’s roots, a backwards-looking exploration of what went on beneath, and in spite of, each of those beginnings. Originally from California, Solnit grew up in Marin County and moved to San Francisco during her adolescence in the 1960s. The city served as a foundry for her artistic and personal development, helping her grow into the prominent essayist and cultural critic familiar to readers today: a veritable polymath who’s published over seventeen books on topics ranging from art history to environmental issues, language, and gender politics. She is probably most famous for coining, in her 2014 collection Men Explain Things to Me, the term “mansplaining” after recounting an infuriating conversation she once had with a male colleague who dismissively told her about her own book.

Throughout the winding chapters of Recollections of My Nonexistence, Solnit offers up meditations on the subjects that have come to define her work—art, politics, history, gender—and the mentors and friends she found along the path of her artistic development. She gives us a tour of the myriad influences that have shaped her writerly voice, and the violence she’s endured while overcoming self-effacement—the street harassment, gaslighting, and solitude she’s faced in her life as a woman.

As a memoir, it is especially interesting for longtime Solnit fans and aspiring writers. Throughout the book, Solnit signposts her career, illuminating the personal experiences that inspired many of her most famous works. Again, Solnit makes the political personal, using the story of her life to delve deep into memory and extract the sort of observations on cultural and political power that have always been a bright thread in her work. 

In a more literary sense, Solnit tracks her progression as a young woman in the world, and the challenges she faced while “engaged in the heroic task of becoming.” It’s in that spirit that Solnit dedicates the start of the book to describing in great detail her first apartment on Lyon Street in San Francisco, a sacred, foundational space where she’d spend the next quarter century, searching for and creating an identity as both a writer and artist. The apartment, she explains with a nod to Woolf, is a room of her own, a physical arena that grants her space and freedom to create. Within the room itself is a writing desk, a photo of which is tucked between the book’s title pages. In addition to the standard symbolism, Solnit imbues the desk with a stark reality: it was given to her when she was nineteen by a friend who was later stabbed to death by an abusive partner. Her first apartment, then, is a site at once of gendered trauma and a reclamation of the power of art and self-fulfillment.

Given how the book’s first half is dedicated to describing her apartment on Lyon Street and the desk that made her a writer, it’s not surprising that throughout Recollections of My Nonexistence Solnit places a particular emphasis on home and homemaking. Although she communicates a palpable longing for her years of apprenticeship, during which she had time and space to grow, the way Solnit expresses her nostalgia often feels unproductively sentimental. What’s strange about the book, given her reputation as a deft and fearless miner of her own experience, is the way it seems to lack any exploration of ambivalence; Solnit gives us a complete, picture-perfect vision of her development as an artist, one that moves smoothly from one period to the next. There’s no sense of her exploring her own ideas in the moment; we aren’t given the conflicts of youth coming to understand itself and its own contradictions. Instead, the finished product of Solnit today—a celebrity feminist—seems to be reading back into her past a cohesiveness that couldn’t, or at least shouldn’t, have been there at the time. “I have no regrets about the roads I took,” she tells us. It’s not to say that she should have regrets, but you’re still left wishing she would have shared more of her uncertainties.

What is interesting is that Solnit has written a memoir through the lens of a type of longing defined by the late literary scholar Svetlana Boym as “reflective nostalgia.” For Boym, reflective nostalgia tends to produce a collectivized vision of the past that is complete and flawless, and which exists only in a realm of detached longing. The opposite of reflective nostalgia, Boym explains, is restorative nostalgia, a form of self-exploration that demonstrates how we gain an understanding of the past not just from ourselves, but from the communities in which we exist and whose values we share and interact with. Restorative nostalgia presents an image of the past that is fundamentally dynamic, and that places less emphasis on the individual; as a result, it’s more difficult to return to, and lends itself less easily to the creation of sentimental visions of the past. In describing her youth, Solnit delivers what feels like a perfect, prepackaged narrative of struggle and overcoming; the thorniness of the lived past seems to have disappeared altogether in the glare of her present success. In other words, the potential for the past to actually teach us something about ourselves is absent. The mastery of self-analysis that makes Solnit’s other work so strong actually prevents her from engaging vulnerably with her past, preventing her from recreating the mindset of her younger self.

What Solnit gives us is ultimately a thin, singular vision of her past, one that does not adequately address the complicated intersections between power, race, gender, and sexuality one would expect her to grasp intuitively, because she doesn't give us an exploration of a larger community beyond her own identity. The book begins as a sensitive charting of the growth of her ideas and feminist perspective. As a white, cisgender, heterosexual woman, she demonstrates a solid understanding of how our identities embody the world around us and the privilege we are or are not given. What is wanting, however, is an exploration of her own confusion and ambivalence; we miss an image of her coming to terms with these facets of her identity in the moment. Instead, we are left with a sentimental fondness for the world of yesterday, one in which Solnit’s critical consciousness seems to have been fully formed right out of the gate. Recollections of My Nonexistence feels too singular in scope, so that Solnit’s return, through such a narrow lens, becomes an unproductive one.

While critics deemed her collection, Men Explain Things to Me, a breakthrough of contemporary feminist criticism, Recollections of My Nonexistence doesn’t give us anything new, aside from a series of uncomplicated stories from Solnit’s past. Of course, that’s the function of a memoir, but it is strange how flat the stories seem to feel, as though they’ve been filtered through an aggressively sensitive contemporary framework. Much of her argument about the difficulties women face building lives in the world is made up of views that are difficult to argue with if you call yourself a feminist—and perhaps that is why Solnit herself does not receive much critique. But her perspective is limited and feels redundant within today’s political landscape. At one point she writes:

 “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...that voice that was most articulate when I was alone at the desk speaking through my fingers...All the worst things that happened to other women because they were women could happen to you because you were a woman. Even if you weren't killed, something in you was.”

It’s here that Solnit fails to note the particulars of the privilege inherent to her identity—how her whiteness, class, and heterosexuality were all protecting her from harm in ways that others suffered. She does not spend time dissecting the nuance between those who would never get a voice, and why, and the reasons why she was able to even have that space, the desk at which to “speak through her fingers.” Though Recollections is indeed a memoir, Solnit fails to make explicit reference to her areas of privilege, rendering her work largely inaccessible to readers who don’t look like her. It is the focus on her apartment as the necessary, sacred space that made her into a writer that feels singular. Admittedly, she occasionally acknowledges these factors. “And now I can see how white the world of publishing was and is, and that though some doors slammed because of my gender, others remained open because of my race,” she explains at one point, though it feels as though she’s merely skimmed the surface of the idea; after pointing out the disparity, she swiftly moves on.

Other flaws crop up when Solnit turns to the question of her literary influences. The list is long and varied, encompassing Wordsworth, C.S. Lewis, Philip Levine, Milan Kundera, Willa Cather, and Anne Frank among others. If the list seems maybe a little too varied, Solnit does little to explain its range—her discussion of her influences feels like a survey, the kind of thing you’d drop when asked to list your favorite writers; in other words, there seems a lack of reflection—on what has shaped her, on her past. Ultimately, without emotional connection to the larger story of her life, the tone often comes across as didactic, and slightly condescending. Even the book’s titular conceit, that of “nonexistence,” feels like an example of the polished and academic prose style that Solnit ends up using to obscure the fact that her memoir ultimately lacks depth.

The term, “nonexistence,” Solnit’s catch-all for the erasure she experienced as a woman, feels like an easy way of inserting gender dynamics into the act of reading without saying anything interesting or new. Solnit expresses feelings of being erased and made voiceless by the overarching patriarchal structures of society. Reading and eventually writing, as she explains, is another, healthier form of non-existence, one that allows her to escape into other lives, to slip out of the non-existent husk of herself. Without the pomp, she is escaping reality by reading. The central irony of Recollections of My Nonexistence is of course the impossibility of its project—how do you recollect a self that did not, technically speaking, exist? This narrative of an absent figure, intended to show the nebulousness of her status as a woman pursuing the work she did, might actually show something else—her lack of a grasp on her former self.