Rebecca Solnit [CANCELED]

Update

This event has been canceled. We apologize for any inconvenience. Ticket holders will be refunded automatically within a few business days.

Harvard Book Store is thrilled to welcome REBECCA SOLNIT—celebrated author of Men Explain Things to Me, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, The Faraway Nearby, and others—for a discussion of her new memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence. She will be joined in conversation by CARMEN MARIA MACHADO, author of the widely acclaimed Her Body and Other Parties and In the Dream House: A Memoir.

Important Update:

Book Signing: This event will not include a book signing component, but all books will be personally pre-signed by the author, including books purchased on-site and books bundled with tickets. We apologize for any inconvenience or disappointment. 

About Recollections of My Nonexistence

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; of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself; of how punk rock gave form and voice to her own fury and explosive energy.

Solnit recounts how she came to recognize the epidemic of violence against women around her, the street harassment that unsettled her, the trauma that changed her, and the authority figures who routinely disdained and disbelieved girls and women, including her. Looking back, she sees all these as consequences of the voicelessness that was and still is the ordinary condition of women, and how she contended with that while becoming a writer and a public voice for women's rights.

She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer—books themselves, the gay men around her who offered other visions of what gender, family, and joy could be, and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West. These influences taught her how to write in the way she has ever since, and gave her a voice that has resonated with and empowered many others.

Praise for Recollections of My Nonexistence

“One of our foremost thinkers on womanhood explores the journey of her becoming in this deeply personal memoir about her youth in San Francisco. In her searing, sensitive voice, Solnit recalls the epidemic of violence against women . . . tracing her journey as a writer through her journey to speak out on behalf of women.” —Esquire

“An inquisitive, perceptive, and original thinker and enthralling writer . . . Solnit has created an unconventional and galvanizing memoir-in-essays that shares key, often terrifying, formative moments in her valiant writing life . . . [and] illuminates with piercing lyricism the body-and-soul dangers women face in our complexly, violently misogynist world . . . an incandescent addition to the literature of dissent and creativity.” —Booklist

“Enlightening . . . a thinking person’s book about writing, female identity, and freedom by a powerful and motivating voice for change.” —Publishers Weekly