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about writing an essay with the title “Men Explain Things to Me”, until eventually, rising early one morning, she sat down at her desk and it just poured out of her.

This anecdote comes towards the end of Recollections of My Non-Existence. It is a moment of fruition, the fitting culmination to the narrative that precedes it: that of how Solnit – now recognised as a cultural critic par excellence – found her voice, as a writer, as a woman and a feminist, and as an activist (though, as she comes to show us, they’re all inextricably interlaced).

The world in which Solnit came of age was an inhospitable one for women. In more recent years she’s co-written three inspired alternative city atlases (of San Francisco, New Orleans and New York), but here she looks back to the San Francisco neighbourhood – with “the verdant panhandle of Golden Gate Park to the south” – in which she lived for the first 25 years of her adult life, beginning in the early Eighties, charting a harrowing topography of violence against women, the crimes against their bodies “made possible on an epic scale”, she explains, by the suppression of their voices.

Initially, she became an expert “in the art of non-existence”, at “fading and slipping and sneaking away, backing off, squirming out of tight situations, dodging unwanted hugs and kisses and hands, at taking up less and less space on the bus as yet another man spread into my seat, at gradually disengaging, or suddenly absenting myself ”. Becoming a writer was “to lay claim to having something to say, to deserve participation in the conversation that was culture, to have a voice”.

Recollections of My NonExistence is not a tell-all autobiography. “[O]nly so much of the chaos and fluidity of experience can be sifted and herded onto pages,” she explains, of writing in general. “You’re not carving marble: you’re grabbing a handful of flotsam from a turbulent river; you can arrange the detritus but you can’t write the whole river.”

Indeed, what many of us might think of as the anchoring details of a life only flicker into shape, indistinct as shadows on a wall: her description of her parents’ “violently miserable marriage”; an all-but-throwaway line about not being able to trust them to bail her out as a financially precarious young adult; halfdrawn portraits of lovers.

Solnit’s writing has long drawn on her experience of being in the world – her travels (A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland), her love of walking (Wanderlust: A History of Walking), the autobiographical essays of A Field Guide to Getting Lost, or The Faraway Nearby, a memoir about her relationship with her mother and travels to Iceland via discussions of apricots, to name just a few – but Recollections of My NonExistence, in tackling the silencing of women’s voices, finally supplies the personal story that lies behind the highly politicised, feminist essays she’s been writing over the past few years. “Now I wonder,” she writes, “if everything I have ever written is a counterweight to that attempt to reduce a young woman to nothing.”

This is a book that goes to dark places, but it also cherishes the people who have helped Solnit on her way: in particular, queer culture, which taught her that the notion of family “can be liberated from conventional roles”; and the passionate, lifelong friendships that have been her ballast. In the same way that “Men Explain Things To Me” is fuelled by anger but infused with hope, Recollections of My Non-Existence is both the story of where we’ve been and a celebration of how far we’ve come.

‘Is everything I have written a counter to his attempt to reduce a woman to nothing?’

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SPEAKING UP Rebecca Solnit