Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) is an American writer and activist. She has written on a variety of subjects, including feminism, the environment, politics, place, and art.

Solnit is the author of seventeen books, including River of Shadows, which won the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism; A Paradise Built in Hell, originally published in 2009 and later revised in 2020, which charts altruistic community responses to disaster; The Faraway Nearby, a wide-ranging memoir published in 2013; and Men Explain Things to Me, a collection of essays on feminism and women's writing first published in 2014.

Early life and education

Solnit was born in 1961 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to a Jewish father and Irish Catholic mother. In 1966, her family moved to Novato, California, where she grew up. "I was a battered little kid. I grew up in a really violent house where everything feminine and female and my gender was hated", she has said of her childhood. She skipped high school altogether, enrolling in an alternative junior high in the public school system that took her through tenth grade, when she passed the General Educational Development tests.

When she was 17, she went to study in Paris at the American College in Paris (now the American University of Paris). She returned to California to finish her college education at San Francisco State University. She then received a master's degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984 and has been an independent writer since 1988.

Career

Activism

Solnit has worked on environmental and human rights campaigns since the 1980s, notably with the Western Shoshone Defense Project in the early 1990s, as described in her book Savage Dreams, and with antiwar activists throughout the Bush era. She has discussed her interest in climate change and the work of 350.org and the Sierra Club, and in women's rights, especially violence against women.

Writing

Her writing has appeared in numerous publications in print and online, including The Guardian newspaper and Harper's Magazine, where she is the first woman to regularly write the Easy Chair column founded in 1851. She was also a regular contributor to the political blog TomDispatch and is (as of 2018) a regular contributor to LitHub.

Solnit has written seventeen books as well as essays in numerous museum catalogs and anthologies. Her 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster began as an essay called "The Uses of Disaster: Notes on Bad Weather and Good Government" published by Harper’s magazine the day that Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf coast. It was partially inspired by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which Solnit described as "a remarkable occasion...a moment when everyday life ground to a halt and people looked around and hunkered down". In a conversation with filmmaker Astra Taylor for BOMB magazine, Solnit summarized the radical theme of A Paradise Built in Hell: "What happens in disasters demonstrates everything an anarchist ever wanted to believe about the triumph of civil society and the failure of institutional authority."

In 2014, Haymarket Books published Men Explain Things to Me, a collection of feminist essays by Solnit on topics such as violence against women and the silencing of women. The book has been translated into many languages, including Spanish, French, German, Polish, Portuguese, Finnish, Swedish, Italian, Slovak, Dutch, and Turkish. Although Solnit's title essay is often credited with introducing the word "mansplaining"—which refers to an alleged tendency in men to assume authoritative knowledge and "explain" things, generally to women, in a condescending or patronizing way—Solnit did not use the word in the essay nor did she later express her approval of the word. Men Explain Things to Me contains illustrations by visual and performance artist Ana Teresa Fernández.

In 2019, Solnit wrote a new version of Cinderella, also for Haymarket Books, called Cinderella Liberator. In this feminist revision, Solnit reclaims Ella from the cinders and gives both the prince ("Prince Nevermind" in her version) and Ella new futures that involve thinking for themselves, acting out free will, starting businesses, and becoming friends, rather than dependent lovers. As Syreeta McFadden argued for NBC News, Cinderella has long been retold, changing with the times. Solnit's book uses Arthur Rackham's original silhouetted drawings of Cinderella.

In 2020, Solnit published Recollections of My Nonexistence, a memoir and coming-of-age narrative about her formative years in 1980s San Francisco when she found her identity as a writer, feminist, and political activist. In The New York Times review, Jenny Odell called it "an un-self-centered book that often reverses the figure-ground relationship, portraying the emergence of a writer and her voice from a particular cultural moment and set of fortuitous influences." Odell added that the "Nonexistence" of the title referred to Solnit's "instinct as a young woman to disappear, her sense that her appearance was dangerous" in an atmosphere where gender-based violence was lurking.

Reception

Solnit has received two NEA fellowships for Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Award, a Lannan literary fellowship, and a 2004 Wired Rave Award for writing on the effects of technology on the arts and humanities. In 2010, Utne Reader magazine named Solnit as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World". Her 2013 novel The Faraway Nearby was shortlisted for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award.

New York Times book critic Dwight Garner called Solnit "the kind of rugged, off-road public intellectual America doesn't produce often enough....Solnit's writing, at its worst, can be dithering and self-serious, Joan Didion without the concision and laser-guided wit. At her best, however [...] she has a rare gift: the ability to turn the act of cognition, of arriving at a coherent point of view, into compelling moral drama."