Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography
Longlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political Writing

An 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, from the author of Orwell's Roses

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. 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. 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.

Beyond 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. 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.

• We started tracking this book on October 27, 2019.
• This book was $13.99 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 79 times in the past 1,991 days.
• The current price of this book is $6.99 last checked 17 hours ago.
• This book is at its lowest price in the past 90 days.
• This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is $4.99.
• The lowest price to date was $4.99 last reached on November 24, 2024.
• This book has been $4.99 5 times since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was $13.99 last reached on December 24, 2024.
• This book has been $13.99 15 times since we started tracking it.

• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 252 Pages
• File Size: 31 KB