Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

You are always somewhere else. You turn into trees and lakes and birds, you turn into muses, whores, mothers, the vessel for others’ desires and the screen for their projections, and in all that it can be hard to turn into yourself, for yourself. Even reading novels by men can instill this, and it did in my case. Sometimes the women devoured to the bone are praised; often those insistent on their own desires and needs are reviled or rebuked for taking up space, for making noise. You are punished unless you punish yourself into nonexistence in this system. The system is punishment. A novel like Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark in which the ambitious, amorous, extraordinarily talented heroine is not punished comes as a shock.

Solitude was reprieve from this endless task, but when I turned to books I often turned into a man looking at women. Looking at women as problems or trophies or mildly baleful phenomena with opaque motivations and limited consciousness probably did something to me, and so did being encouraged to identify with the man over and over again, and to live in imagination in places where women were just ornaments in the margins or trophies or broodmares. In my case, this meant identifying with male protagonists, with the Jim of the almost womanless Lord Jim and Jim Carroll’s self-anointing stud junkie in The Basketball Diaries and with Pip rather than Estella in Great Expectations, and all the grail seekers and ring bearers and western explorers and chasers and conquerors and haters of women and inhabitants of worlds where women were absent.

Alone, immersed in a book, I was faceless, everyone, anyone, unbounded, elsewhere, free of meetings. I wanted to be someone, to make a face and a self and a voice, but I loved these moments of reprieve. If moments is the word: they were not intermissions in a normally sociable life; they were the life itself

I lived inside books, and though it’s often assumed that we choose books to travel through them to get to the end, there were books I took up residency in, books I read again and again and then picked up and opened anywhere just to be in that world, with those people, with that author’s vision and voice. Jane Austen’s novels, but also Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books, Frank Herbert’s Dune, eventually E. M. Forster, Willa Cather, and Michael Ondaatje, some children’s books I returned to as an adult, and early on novels that don’t have much standing as literature.

Writing is often treated as a project of making things, one piece at a time, but you write from who you are and what you care about and what true voice is yours and from leaving all the false voices and wrong notes behind, and so underneath the task of writing a particular piece is the general one of making a self who can make the work you are meant to make.

Most conventional stories for girls and young women ended in marriage. Women vanished into it. The end. And then what happened and who were they? The fairy tale “Bluebeard” is about a woman who finds out, by disobeying his orders and using the forbidden key to unlock the torture chamber full of her predecessors’ corpses, that she’s married a serial killer, whose intent to kill her is whetted by her knowledge. It’s an unusual fairy tale in that she survives and he does not.

My formative years had been peppered with men who wanted to be Kerouac, and who saw that job as the pursuit of freedom, and saw freedom as freedom from obligation and commitment, and, when it came to art, stream-of-consciousness spontaneity, art freed up from composition and plan. There were so many of them, including the handsome, sweet one I went to my first Nevada Test Site antinuclear action with in 1988 and the arrogant indigent college acquaintance who several years earlier had crashed with me and my gay roommate, devouring the contents of the refrigerator and scribbling condemnations of us in the journal he left lying open.

I did like some things about Kerouac’s prose style, just not the gender politics of the three men who were most often meant when people talked about the Beats. Those politics had contaminated Kerouac’s On the Road for me when I was a teenager. I got as far as the protagonist’s encounter with Terry—“the cutest little Mexican girl” who he later calls “a dumb little Mexican wench” with “a simple and funny little mind.” And then the protagonist—a lightly fictionalized Kerouac—takes off and leaves her. As in the film, a woman is a stationary object, a man is a pilgrim and a heroic wanderer. He’s Odysseus; she’s Penelope, but Homer took an interest in the gallant struggle of the woman who stayed home. It seemed to me that I would never be the footloose protagonist, that I was closer to the young Latina on the California farm who gets left behind, and halfway through I put the novel down. The book was going to go on without people like me, and I was going to go on without it.

I was, in that room, that time, clear and angry about my nonexistence that was otherwise mostly just a brooding anxiety somewhere below the surface. But I remained silent; contributing to the sense of women as burdensome, crazy, angry, intrusive, unfit was not going to help.

Often, when a woman says that bad things have happened to her or to women and the perpetrators were men, she’s accused of hating men, as though the reality of those events is not relevant, only her obligation to be sunny no matter what is, or as though the fact that not all men are awful outweighs the reality that some are in ways that impact her. Often what a woman says is weighed for what kind of woman that makes her and whether she’s still pleasing to others rather than its factual content.