Rebecca Solnit can do no wrong. Another thoughtful collections of musings on womanhood and self, and a book I will think about for weeks after reading it.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an eARC of this book. Rebecca Solnit's memoir. The story of her coming of age in San Francisco . One understands how she came to her political beliefs and actvism. I was there during those years. What she says is very accurate.

A beautiful book. Solnit is able to do what a really moving memoir does and make the personal universal. She describes her experiences as a young woman, a writer, and coming of age and coming into her own intellectual life in a world that so often encourages women to conform, disappear, or otherwise stifle their own voices. I have always been a fan of her writing and essays, but I think I enjoyed this more personal work most of all. She is personal and her observations are provocative, but she draws so deftly from her own memory and experience that her reflections on her life feel full of clarity. Would recommend.

Rebecca Solnit is undoubtedly one of the most imporant writers of our times, and readers who have fallen under the spell of her previous essays (including Men Explain Things to Me) will equally be swept away by her ethereal and dreamy memoir. It focuses in less on Solnit's life and more on her feminist awakening and intellectual journey. A thought-provoking and gorgeously written insight into the mind of a modern writer and thinker.

Lovely, but unfortunately I found it slightly too poetic or lyrical to have a strong narrative. I find plot-driven memoirs do best in our collection.

Solnit is an excellent writer. I cannot express how amazed I was with her ability.

Unfortunately, the subject matter for me, was difficult in a very personal way. It brought up so many emotions and memories of things that happened to me, that happened to my friends, somewhat like her stories. It was difficult reading and I had to pause when this global pandemic hit. There was too much trauma and stress from too many outlets. No doubt I will return to this book by Solnit at another time, when life is calmer. Her previous works are now on my to read pile as well.

I do recommend this book.

I had never read any of Solnit's writing before this, but I can assure you that I will be reading every single thing I can get my hands on. She's engaging, fascinating, and inspiring. I think our patrons will love it, so I'll be ordering copies for the branch.

Rebecca Solnit has been one of my favorite writers, and this new book is a perfect example of her writing style. I am fascinated in San Francisco, and love reading about living in the city through the decades. But Solnit is more than a tour guide, this is an anthem to growing up in the city through the 80s with all the tension of gender violence and all the things that ultimately culminated in her feminist outlook. As someone who grew up in the 80s, I cherished her perspective.

If "we collage ourselves into being," as Rebecca Solnit writes, this memoir is a detailed field guide to the collage that Solnit's life as writer, thinker, activist, artist, teacher, and woman has become. In eight mesmerizing chapters, she leads us through the trails and landscapes of her becoming. Readers hoping for details of her most personal relationships and life choices will be disappointed. This is, rather, an extended meditation (or collage of meditations) on Solnit's becoming and being in relation to the various geographies (physical, social/cultural, historical, intellectual) in which she has lived. The reader who is willing to follow her lead, though, will discover stunning language that invites slowing down and self-examination. I didn't want this book to end.

Thanks to Penguin/Random House and NetGalley for a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Drawn to the book because of the black and white photo on the cover, I found that the cover melded completely with the memoir of the book. You may have read some of Solnit’s essays for which she is more well-known. She’s responsible for the concept of “mansplaining.” Telling the story of her coming of age in the 1980’s in San Francisco, she identifies with the awkward misfits. She’s a daydreamer. Her emergence as a cultural critic began with her rebellion and her understanding of how words can be used to speak for the silent. Its seldom I would like to quote from a book, but this is one of those I would like to quote. She knows how to write poetic prose. I can’t quote because I am reading an uncorrected proof of the book, too bad. So you’ll have to discover them on your own.

I will always pick up the new Solnit book. This memoir displays both breadth and depth, effortlessly connecting her experiences and memories with human issues, delving into racism, classism, misogyny, and more unflinchingly. But the deepest hurt and the hottest rage are combined with tender reminders of the good that people are capable of, the connections that remind her and us of how we touch each other’s lives, and there is hope.

In Rebecca Solnit's memoir, Recollections of my Nonexistence weaves the development of her feminism through stories about her early life in San Francisco and her early work as a writer.

I found these stories poignant and touching. Even informative, in some ways, for aspiring writers, artists and activists.

This book was...fine. I enjoy reading Solnit's essays, so I was looking forward to reading her memoir, thinking that I would actually learn a bit more about her. This was very much focused on Solnit finding her voice and learning how to use it through her writing. The problem is that she neglects to tell the reader anything personal about herself. I felt so disconnected from the author. She almost completely skips over her childhood and starts the memoir with her as a young adult living on her own. She skims over relationships, friendships, or anything that would showcase emotion. Solnit spends a large chunk of the book going over events of the 1970s and 1980s, dropping names of artists and writers and movements that I've never heard of, and only spending 20 pages or so on her career from the 2000s onward, which is the point at which she became well-known as an author. I think it was a mistake on the part of the publisher to market this as a memoir, since it really is a series of recollections on a writer finding her voice, with very little biographical information at all.

This review also appears on my Goodreads page (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/47492478-recollections-of-my-nonexistence)

I wanted to love this book - I love memoirs in general. But I just couldn't get in to this one. It was more a memoir of a time and a place than a person, and I struggled with it. It seems that Solnit's fans are avid, but maybe because I haven't read her previous works, I didn't know what I was getting into.

The focus that it takes to write a compelling memoir is fascinating and Rebecca Solnit has not disappointed with her, "Recollections of My Nonexistence". Beginning with snippets from her childhood in the Bay Area and returning to that time throughout the work, Solnit paints a picture of San Francisco through the eyes of a female author, struggling for recognition during the slow gentrification of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.

A large part of the work deals with the fear that women face simply walking down the street, but more so on their own in metropolitan places in America. This fear can carry over into the rural and suburban areas of the country just as easily, but there is something to be said for the distinct levels of anxiety that come along with being a solo, woman dweller in an urban area. This feeling of fear is not unique to living in America, as women all over the world deal with fear of place on a daily basis, but Solnit eloquently shows the depths of which this fear manifests in her own daily life, from the perspective of a middle-aged American woman.

But it isn't all about fear. Solnit crafts a lovely history of her writing and the challenges she faced in the early days of learning to be a journalist and eventually moving over to the non-fiction (and later creative non-fiction) areas of composition. She weaves through her research on her early works and shows us the unique difficulties she faced to be taken seriously and to feel like she was on the right path. As she writes at the desk a friend gifted her after Solnit helped her release herself from a bad (to say the least) relationship, she allows her anxieties to inform her work in a way that is ever-engaging. Memoirs are so often rollercoaster rides of semi-good writing, but with this work, the prose often takes over in a way that transports you directly into the room where Solnit is writing. It allows the reader to come along for the journey, rather than to simply watch it unfold. 

Overall, this memoir is well worth the read and I would recommend it to anyone that is interested in San Francisco history, memoirs of artists and/or authors, feminist scholars, or anyone that enjoys reading about the history of place through the lens of an individual lived life. I suppose that, in the end, is what a memoir should be and Solnit delivers fully with this work.

Rebecca Solnit is a light in the darkness. This is a moving look back at formative experiences from her past which set her on course for the writer and activist she has become. In another author's hands, this kind of work might be egocentric or preachy, but Solnit focuses on the other people, places, and circumstances that inspired her and informed her path.

Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for a digital ARC.

Once again, one of the most prolific docmenters of our time hits it out of the park.

In this book, Solnit revisits scenes from her childhood, teenage, and young adult years in San Francisco. She shares vignettes that influenced how she has evolved her outlook on herself and our world. She shares her process of discovering writing as her voice in this world, how she began sharing it, and the time it took for people to listen to her words and ideas. Many suggestions and tips for aspiring writers. As with most of her work, there is an emphasis on violence toward women and the effort of the patriarchy to silence women throughout time. She shares her activism and how she has matured as a result of her involvement in Native American issues. A worthy contribution to feminist theory, literature, and philosophy.