Book Review 1 - Recollections of My Non Existence
““I gave away the only television I ever owned after an evening when I turned the dial and found that a young woman was being murdered on each channel” ”
I should admit that the majority of the books I read are non-fiction and written by women. Now that I think about it the fiction I do read is often written by men. There might be something in that, but I’m not sure what. During this time I have found myself cleaving for females voices and to engage, as I imagine I am, with them through the books they’ve written. I found exactly this in the superb new book by Rebecca Solnit called “Recollections of My Non-Existence”. Below are my thoughts.
The signs were there. Rebecca Solnit has never, as far as I can tell, looked away from what is in front of her. And for her - like most of us, or at least half of us, that means a society in which woman are not equal. This lack of equality is due to our gender. Or, lets put that differently -
““Feminism”, as writer Marie Sheer remarked in 1986, “is the radical notion that women are people,” a notion not universally accepted but spreading nonetheless.” ”
Solnit, in this new book, is more fervent and unapologetic when she declares that, “there is a pattern of violence against women that’s broad and deep and horrific and incessantly overlooked” . She then goes on to illustrate this with examples and intellect. The violence she describes is political, cultural & physical, which is to say it is pervasive. This book, a sort of autobiography, is a revoke to the notion that we must silently endure and tolerate this.
It is a relatively small book - there might also be something in that as self-novels written by men tend, in my experience, to be much longer - is somewhat dense in terms of content and what it evokes. I found myself being pulled very deeply into it. I also had a sense that I might have “found the book”, by this I mean I might have found the book that definitively discusses the gendered world we live in. I have read reviews which have told me that this book isn’t an autobiography rather it is only a sort of feminist pamplet disguised as a potted history of female victim-hood. I’m not wholly against that in terms of message or truth. I do, however, find myself disagreeing with the idea that the two are contradictory. Rebecca Solnit is, by writing about her life, giving space to something universal and true.
A few of her recollections stood out to me. There is the account of a woman who was murdered close to Rebecca Solnit’s small Califorian flat where she lived for 26 years. The crux of the story is simple - a young woman returns to her locked marital home and in due course “a sailor, by his own account, offered to get her a taxi and killed her instead”. Accounts like this make up the content of the chapter titled “Life During Wartime”, where Solnit discusses her own stories and the stories of other women. She weaves these together to give a sense that these are not isolated and that there is a commonality - we live in a society where there is a pandemic, men are violent towards women.
She goes further - that somehow we are asked to accept this phenomenon. We are, as woman, expected “to adapt to this reality, which was treated as something as natural or inevitable as the weather. But it wasn’t weather; it wasn’t nature; it wasn’t inevitable and immutable. It was culture…”. The examples she uses - the sort of ordinary violence that isn’t shown on Netflix and additionally the very screen friendly stories - richly illustrate the proliferation of violence and the ways women are shrunk. As she puts it - “the story was still about him”. In this story, this story of her life, women reclaim the front row.
This is not a dour book, though it could be. It is a book about women and the world as it is. It is beautifully written. The language and pace is finely tuned. Which isn’t to say you’ll agree wholeheartedly with her and casually walk away. She is, and I suspect on purpose, pushing people to respond and challenge the status quo. For me it felt liberating and expansive.