I cannot say I'm not overwhelmed with joy to read this after a very saddening year for my experiencing of the publishing world...
Rebecca Solnit: ‘The essay is powerful again. We’re in a golden age’
The US writer on her new collection of essays on ‘further feminisms’, the Trump ‘horrorshow’, and the joy of being an auntSunday 27 August 2017
By her own account, the writer Rebecca Solnit has never been an optimist. But this is not to say that she isn’t hopeful. “An optimist thinks everything will be fine no matter what, and that justifies doing nothing,” she tells me, just back from her early morning row in San Francisco bay. “But hopefulness as I define it means that we don’t know what is going to happen, and in that uncertainty there is room to act.
Action, moreover, may take many forms in this, the age of Trump, some of them very subtle. “How the American public responds to this unprecedented crisis has everything to do with what happens [next], which is why I feel like my job is trying to remind people we do have [some] power,” she says. “I see the well-justified fear among immigrants, trans people, Muslims. But I also think this will end badly for the administration, which is in free fall. He’s freaked out. He’s thrashing in panic.”
Her voice, which sounds almost merry, drops a little. “To use a Clockwork Orangeword, this is a horrorshow.”
Such hopefulness is not only a matter of temperament. How could Solnit fail to be encouraged by the fact that, seemingly against the odds, the essay has made a surprise return to the near-centre of intellectual life, particularly as it is lived online? However much she dislikes the narrative that has her toiling away in obscurity “knitting socks for wild geese in my lean-to on the prairie” until 2008, when her piece Men Explain Things to Me suddenly went viral – “I was plenty visible before,” she writes to me in an email the day after we speak via Skype – it is an undeniable truth that she is now more in demand than ever. “When I started [Solnit is 56], the essay was belles-lettres, decorative. Essays by women, particularly, tended to be treated as memoir even when they were not. Now they’re seen as powerful and compelling again. We’re in a golden age.”
Her work has an impact she could once have only dreamed of. Last May a piece she wrote about Trump for Harper’s – “once upon a time, a child was born into wealth and wanted for nothing” – had a million hits online in just three days.
Solnit’s latest collection of essays, The Mother of All Questions, works as a companion to Men Explain Things To Me, the slim volume that preceded it in 2014 (Solnit did not invent the term mansplaining, but having been coined shortly after this book’s title essay appeared, it will now forever be associated with her name). Mostly, the new book, subtitled Further Feminisms, is about violence against women, and the various forms this takes, including the many ways in which they are silenced. But there are two essays involving books, among them 80 Books No Woman Should Read, Solnit’s response to a notorious (and notoriously male) reading list put together by Esquire magazine; a piece about the 1956 movie Giant, starring Elizabeth Taylor; and, finest of all, the title essay, a deft and quietly furious polemic that chips away once again at the idea of motherhood as the sole key to feminine identity (Solnit, who has never married, is childless).
“Yes, the having-children dilemma,” she says, giving the finger to an imaginary interlocutor. “It’s about what makes a worthwhile life. The person who asks you that question – why don’t you have children? – doesn’t want to know you more deeply. In fact, it’s not a question. It’s an accusation. What they’re saying is: I’ve judged you, and found you wrong, weird, insufficiently feminine. What’s so maddening is this assumption that children fulfil a woman – as though we’ve never seen an unhappy mother. It’s the same with marriage. Guess what? There are unhappy marriages: I even saw a movie about one, once. These people see love as a commodity that is there to be gathered. It’s a very aspirational, even capitalist, view of love.”
She likes to tell her friends with children that she’s here to “de-nuclearise” the family, the idea being that in the 21st century, just as in centuries past, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends matter just as much (she loves being an aunt).
Isn’t it wearying still to be dealing with this stuff? Mightn’t we have expected more progress by now in the matter of equality? “I do come up against that frustration,” she says. “And yes, it would have been wonderful if as soon as we introduced the radical idea that women are people and have inalienable rights, everyone had just agreed and we could have moved on.
“But the patriarchy is rooted in the Old Testament: the fact that it didn’t get dismantled in a few decades doesn’t dismay me. When I look at how much things have changed since my birth and today, it’s pretty amazing.”
A new generation of women is, she believes, simply not going to take it any more when it comes to rape and gender violence. Sure, Silicon Valley was “built by white men in their own image”; it dismays her that these same men talk in terms of what women can do to avoid threats online rather than dealing with the attacks themselves, as if the victims were responsible (a state of affairs that harks back to the way rape used widely to be regarded). Nevertheless, she thinks of social media as “a Greek chorus of a million women reinforcing the message that we are not going to let this [violence] be erased or excused”.
Bewitched by stories, Solnit wanted to be a writer almost from the moment she learned to read. The third of four siblings – she is the only girl – she grew up in San Francisco. Her parents were leftists who marched against the Vietnam war, but her father, a town planner, was violent – she has written that he once woke her in the night by throwing chocolate milk in her face – and her parents eventually divorced, an event that cast a prolonged shadow over her teenage years.
When she left school she enrolled at the American University in Paris, after which she studied English at Berkeley, California, where she also enrolled as a graduate journalism student: “Journalism was the only model for nonfiction then, and I still feel lucky that I didn’t end up in some MFA [master of fine arts] programme with a bunch of white kids writing memoirs about their suffering.” Afterwards she worked as an art critic until, under the influence of her brother, David, with whom she first visited the Nevada nuclear test site, she gradually became more interested in green issues.
Her frame of reference grew ever wider, and her writing more singular. Among her books are River of Shadows, an award-winning study of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and The Faraway Nearby, which partly tells the story of her mother’s decline into Alzheimer’s and Solnit’s efforts to reconcile with her (their relationship was difficult, the mother having been envious of the daughter), but whose broader themes, as explored in essays on such subjects as Iceland and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, have to do with questions of empathy and human solidarity.
“Lots of people want to be me now,” she says. “But they didn’t 15 years ago, when I was paying my dues. I lived like a graduate student for a long time after I was one, and I still have fairly frugal habits.” Still, even in the leaner times, she never thought of giving up. “I’m an introvert who loves staying home alone, and it wasn’t as if I was yearning to be super-famous. I didn’t want to be the Stephen King of feminist prose style, or something.”
Grateful as she is to those who read her, she now worries about burnout: “So many people want so many things from me, and that makes it hard to clear the space to be deeply thoughtful, to have the unbroken time in which the best writing takes place.”
Carefully, she lifts a hank of her long hair and pushes it over her shoulder. “It’s not that I feel sorry for myself. These are Cadillac problems. But I’m not sure what great rebellion will give me the time in which I might do pretty good work.” She sounds almost wistful. “In a way, my golden age was 20 years ago, a young woman with a pick-up truck, travelling across the American west, participating in land right struggles. There was no internet, which gave me a certain quality of time. The writing was going somewhere, and I was making a modest living. It was a great adventure.”
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• The Mother of All Questions by Rebecca Solnit is published by Granta (12.99) on 7 September. To order a copy for £21.25 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
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Link: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/27/rebecca-solnit-interview-essays-feminism-trump-the-mother-of-all-questions
