How to take up less space on the bus

Her viral essay inspired the term ‘mansplaining’. Now Rebecca Solnit gives us the back story, says Lucy Scholes

‘TRECOLLECTIONS OF MY NON-EXISTENCE by Rebecca Solnit 256pp, Granta, £16.99, ebook £12.03

here are three key things that matter in having a voice,” writes Rebecca Solnit in her memoir Recollections of My Non-Existence: “audibility, credibility, and consequence”. It’s more than simply possessing “the animal capacity to utter sounds”, it means “the ability to participate fully in the conversations that shape your society, your relations to others, and your own life”.

Solnit’s most famous work, “Men Explain Things to Me” (an essay first published online in 2008, and subsequently reprinted in her 2014 book of the same title) begins with a personal anecdote that’s now the stuff of legend. During a party at the home of an older “imposing man who’d made lots of money”, she mentions that she’s recently written a book about Eadweard Muybridge. Her host interrupts her, beginning to regale Solnit with a description of a recently published “very important Muybridge book”, without for one minute stopping to consider that the two books are one and the same, a book that, as it turns out, he hasn’t even read, simply read about.

The essay immediately went viral. It also gave rise to the now ubiquitous term “mansplaining” (which was officially added to the OED in 2014). This man spoke to Solnit the way he did not just because of his own smug sense of authority and superiority, but because he couldn’t comprehend that she might be the author of the “very important” book he’d read about, nor did he listen to what she was telling him. As she explains here, she’d actually joked for years