In 1981, Rebecca Solnit rented a studio apartment in San Francisco that
would be her home for the next twenty-five years. There, she began to
come to terms with the epidemic of violence against women around her,
the street harassment that unsettled her, and the authority figures that
routinely disbelieved her. That violence weighed on her as she faced
the task of having a voice in a society that preferred women to shut up
or go away.
Set in the era of punk, of growing gay pride, of
counter culture and West Coast activism, during the latter years of
second wave feminism, Recollections of My Non-Existence is the
foundational story of an emerging artist struggling against patriarchal
violence and scorn. Recalling the experience of living with fear, which
Solnit contends is the normal state of women, she considers how
oppression impacts on creativity and recounts the struggle to find a
voice and have it be heard. Place and the growing culture of activism
liberated her, as did the magical world of literature and books.
And over time, the clamour of voices against violence to women
coalesced in the current feminist upheaval, a movement in which Solnit
was a widely audible participant. Here is an electric account of the
pauses and gains of feminism in the past forty years; and an
extraordinary portrait of an artist, by a seminal American writer.
Recollections of My Non-Existence - Rebecca Solnit
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£9.99