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Virtual Event: Rebecca Solnit Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir featuring Chanel Miller

March 12, 2021 @ 7:00 pm

 |  $20

Details

Date:
March 12, 2021
Time:
7:00 pm
Cost:
$20
Website:
https://www.harvard.com/event/virtual_event_rebecca_solnit/

Venue

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge, MA 02138 United States
Phone:
617-661-1515
Website:
https://www.harvard.com/

Organizer

Harvard Book Store
Phone:
(617) 661-1515
Website:
http://harvard.com/
About

All tickets include a paperback copy of Recollections of My Nonexistence and a bookplate signed by the author.

In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher, and of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself. She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer—books themselves; the gay community that presented a new model of what else gender, family, and joy could mean; and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West.

Beyond being a memoir, Solnit’s book is also a passionate argument: that women are not just impacted by personal experience, but by membership in a society where violence against women pervades. Looking back, she describes how she came to recognize that her own experiences of harassment and menace were inseparable from the systemic problem of who has a voice, or rather who is heard and respected and who is silenced—and how she was galvanized to use her own voice for change.