This disappearance is primarily, for Solnit, a question of the erasure of women by men. The trajectory of her life has taken her from invisibility to prominence, and though she is careful to acknowledge her own privilege in certain areas, she has enough experience of being young, female and poor to speak with authority about what it means to feel powerless and nonexistent – sometimes even actively to choose nonexistence in the face of harassment, “since existence was so perilous”. Over the years, her work has become increasingly concerned with stories: who gets to tell theirs, whose are given airtime, whose discredited, or erased so comprehensively that we do not even notice they are missing. “Becoming a writer formalises something essential about becoming a human: the task of figuring out what stories to tell and how to tell them and who you are in relation to them, which you choose and which choose you,” she writes. Her work has become increasingly concerned with stories: who gets to tell theirs, whose are given airtime Anyone hoping that this book, which is billed as a memoir, will offer a more intimate glimpse of the writer, might be disappointed in that regard Solnit does not go in for soul-baring, and even in this personal history she keeps her gaze focused outward, on what her particular encounters can tell us about the prevailing culture of publishing, or the art world, or the environmental movement, or the city at the time.

Recollections of My Non-Existence is Solnit’s account of her formation as a writer, from her arrival in San Francisco in 1981 as a student, through the various shifts in her career as she discovers the themes that move her. Solnit reached greater prominence with the essays Hope in the Dark, written in 2003 at the start of the Iraq war, which became a manifesto against political despair, but it was her 2008 piece Men Explain Things to Me that catapulted her into the mainstream, gave rise to the term “mansplaining” (which entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2014, though the neologism was not hers), made her an idol to a generation of young women and turned her into one of the US’s leading cultural and political commentators.

I first encountered her through her 2000 book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and her work reminded me of essayists of the 1960s and 70s such as Susan Sontag and Joan Didion, who wove together personal experience, academic research, cultural history and pop culture into a new kind of nonfiction that seemed energetic and flexible enough to encompass any subject and offer new ways of seeing it. T here was a time when Rebecca Solnit was a kind of underground secret, like a cult band you had to seek out in obscure venues and only the cognoscenti knew about hearing her writing mentioned by a new acquaintance meant you knew you’d found a soulmate.

Rebecca solnit book