"He explained, patiently, that they were respectable middle-class people. In "Men Explain Things to Me," Solnit follows the ski chalet anecdote with a story about listening to a boyfriend's uncle describe, "as though it were a light and amusing subject," how a neighbor had once "come running out of her house naked in the middle of the night screaming that her husband was trying to kill her." Solnit asked how he knew that his neighbor's husband wasn't trying to kill her. What does the knife-wielding boyfriend care if Solnit writes thousands of gracefully recursive sentences about environmentalism, art, and feminism on a desk given to her by a woman he once tried to kill? On hearing yet another invocation of the power of women's voices, it is easy to wonder, along with the writer Moira Donegan, who reviewed Solnit's last book for The New Yorkerin 2017, "if telling these stories had the power to change the way women are treated, why do we still have so many stories to tell?" Prima facie, the presentation of women's writing as a counterbalance to violent misogyny seems absurdly insufficient, like bringing a collection of Gloria Steinem essays to a gunfight. Now I wonder if everything I have ever written is a counterweight to that attempt to reduce a young woman to nothing." "Then she gave me a platform for my voice. "Someone tried to silence her," Solnit writes. The friend survived her ex was never prosecuted. It was given to her by a friend, who had recently been "stabbed fifteen times by an ex-boyfriend to punish her for leaving him," she writes.
Solnit opens her new book, Recollections of My Nonexistence, which examines these forces and the ways that women work to counter them, with a description of a Victorian writing desk.
"I like incidents of that sort," Solnit writes, "when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that's eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet." When this fact is finally, effortfully, conveyed to him, he went "ashen." The man then held forth about this book for several minutes before Solnit realized he was talking about her book. "And have you heard about the very importantMuybridge book that came out this year?" he asked. In her now famous essay, "Men Explain Things to Me," Rebecca Solnit describes a party in a ski chalet, at which she told the owner of the chalet that she had just written a book about the photographer Eadweard Muybridge.
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