All of it has literally arisen from the foundation that is the desktop.” With such reflections, Solnit paints a resonant and moving portrait of how challenging life can be in the female body. Now I wonder if everything I’ve ever written is a counterweight to that attempt to reduce a young woman to nothing. Then she gave me a platform for my voice. 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. She writes, for instance, about how she inherited a desk from a woman who was stabbed 15 times by a jealous ex-boyfriend: “Someone tried to silence her. As with the mansplaining essay, Recollections is at its most powerful when she shares personal stories that humanize feminist theory. Solnit’s latest work, Recollections of My Nonexistence, is her first memoir. She has reported on gender inequities for decades and gave birth to the concept of “mansplaining” with a 2008 essay in which she recalled a man condescendingly explaining the finer points of a book to her-a book that Solnit actually wrote herself. Rebecca Solnit has established herself as one of the leading feminist voices in the country. That is what Rebecca Solnit explores in a passage from Recollections of My Nonexistence ( public library) her splendid memoir of longings and determinations, of resistances and revolutions, personal and political, illuminating the kiln in which one of the boldest, most original minds of our time was annealed.
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