A love letter to San Francisco’s mean streets

Recollections of My Non-Existence is the Rebecca Solnit book I have been waiting for. I was born four years after the American writer, and on the same continent, and much of what she describes in Recollections feels very familiar: the flamboyant gay scene of the 1980s, swiftly followed by the devastation of the Aids epidemic, the navigation through second-wave feminism, the men who constantly told us ‘what to do and be’ while they scrutinised our bodies. When Solnit was young, ‘nearly everyone who held power and made news was male’. I was fist-pumping by the time I got to: ‘We were trained to please men, and that made it hard to please ourselves. We were trained to make ourselves desirable in ways that made us reject ourselves and our desires.’

The author of more than 20 books, Solnit has tackled art, feminism, political activism and environmental issues. Yet Recollections, as the title suggests, is her most personal work. The trauma of growing up in a violent household casts a long shadow over these pages: ‘At 12 and 13 and 14 and 15, I had been pursued and pressured for sex by adult men on the edge of my familial and social circles.’

She quotes Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world’, to make it clear that one of her life’s missions was to not be the subject of someone else’s poetry. ‘I was trying to find a poetics of my own, with no maps, no guides, not much to go on.’ She was also trying ‘not to get killed’. Although this latter point may sound hyperbolic, violence against women is a continuous, almost unbearable, thread throughout her book, and one which was depressingly familiar to me.