*Recollections of My Nonexistence* | February 2023

What are books if not lenses to view ourselves?

Back when I was teaching Foreign Culture at China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, I would encourage my students to get a VPN so they could read outside accounts of history and everything else blocked online by the CCP. Even though I’d heard stories of troublesome foreigners disappearing, I banked on the in-classroom cameras being off.

Maybe it was never a real risk, only a little thrill that I was pushing boundaries— encouraging others to push and explore theirs. China is a wild place, and a time in my life with a lot of soul searching while feeling adrift, untethered from my homeland and isolated among many, alone together.

One day I’ll condense the experience into more cogent thoughts, until then I have Rebecca Solnit, who manages to articulate many similar(ish) feelings, themes, and experiences in *Recollections of My Nonexistence.*

Evolving as a writer and feminist in 1980s San Francisco, she recounts how the city became her teacher and place of transformation. After leaving home, Solnit embarked on a quest to find her place in life while navigating *the voicelessness that was and still is the ordinary condition of women.*

Seamlessly intertwining the social and cultural history of the American West, *she explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer.* Educational, empowering, and inspiring Solnit leaves us hopeful for the future.

A gorgeous book, it often left me breathless and was one of my favorites of 2021. Highly recommend.

“Nonfiction is at its best an act of putting the world back together—or tearing some piece of it apart to find what's hidden beneath the assumptions or conventions—and in this sense creation and destruction can be akin. The process can be incandescent with excitement, whether from finding some unexpected scrap of information or from recognizing the patterns that begin to arise as the fragments begin to assemble. Something you didn't know well comes into focus, and the world makes sense in a new way, or an old assumption is gutted, and then you try to write it down.”

— Rebecca Solnit, *Recollections of My Nonexistence*

via @Nogglization on Instagram with guest appearance by @WalterTheFrenchieBoi