A memoir of sorts, but as always with Solnit, it conforms to a genre only in so far as she feels like that's useful. "I am not a proper memoir writer in that I cannot reconstruct a convincing version of any of our conversations", she says at one point, and what reference is made to anything before she left home is pretty oblique, though the implications are clear enough all the same – "I'm uninterested in the brutalities of childhood in part because that species has been so dwelt upon while some of the brutalities that come after have not." In large part it is the story precisely of how she came to write the books that she did, a biography of her poetics or her voice more than her self, but which necessarily addresses the self too simply because every voice must come from somewhere, because the journalism teachers who wanted clipped faux-objectivity and the English professor who considered Hemingway the zenith of English style were wrong, and must be shown to be wrong: "I believe in the irreducible and in invocation and evocation, and I am fond of sentences less like superhighways than winding paths". Which she crafts so very well. It's the height of cliche to say that someone writes like a dream, but in Solnit's case it's true in very precise ways: as in a dream, there are areas of evocative mistiness, but others of pin-sharp clarity, and the transitions between the two which you'd think might feel juddering instead happen so smoothly you barely notice that the corridor from your old school is now in a cruise liner on the Moon, or that a description of the first room where Solnit lived independently has flipped, by way of the history of her writing desk, into a disquisition on the weight and the ubiquity of gendered violence, and the even wider erasure with which it's in symbiosis. This has been the recurrent topic of Solnit's recent work, and the one which has made her famous at a whole different level since the publication of Men Explain Things To Me; it's also, she explains here, the one topic she's written about which she never consciously set out to make one of her themes. And isn't there a horrible irony in the way it's forced itself on her like that? One strand of Recollections sees Solnit go back through her previous work, adding in the details not just about how they came to be written, or their legacy, but about the stuff she left out at the time – like the fear of what might happen to a lone woman walking, her own bad experiences in that area, which were a far more marginal presence in her books on walking and on getting lost. Here too you'll find the artist whose reputation she did much to salvage, and who repaid her with sexual harassment; the editors and publicists who sabotaged her either deliberately or simply because they couldn't be arsed not to. Some names are named; given the account of the bullshit lawsuit by one particularly choice specimen, I suspect she's sailed as close to the wind on that as she dared, and that this is a fair bit closer than most would. Of course, legally it helps that some of the culprits are dead now, as in the section monstering the Beats; I especially loved her observation that even Homer, hardly Mr Woke, gives the static women in the Odyssey far more interiority and agency than Kerouac cared to in On The Road.

Not that that's the whole book. It's also a love letter to San Francisco, at least as it was, alongside a recognition of her own small and unwitting part in its gentrification, having once been the first white face in a neighbourhood where her building supervisor was a black man who remembered Bonnie & Clyde hiding out with his sharecropper family. An attempt to capture the flat where she spent much of her life – and for all that I would never watch Through The Keyhole, and find conversations about home improvement make me want to eat my own face, there is something delightful about a writer who can convey these things just telling you about their old home. She talks about how books are like stars, records of fires burning long ago; about how the growth of the human skull, which must set but must not set too soon, is the perfect metaphor for the growth of humans in general. About how the straight male dream of impenetrability would be blind and fatal were it ever realised in full; about how the present becomes past like the colours shading into each other in the evening sky; about the books one reads more to take up residency than to get to the end. This is the sort of stuff that first got me into Solnit, with her Field Guide To Getting Lost, and there's a part of me (and, she's said elsewhere, of her) that would love her to be able to get back to it – not least because that would mean we were in a better world where there was no longer such an urgent need for the angry dissection of the endless tide of pricks. Towards the end she talks about the writers who are less remembered and read because they changed the culture, were assimilated into the compost of the collective way of seeing, which feels almost like she's taking stock of her legacy, though I hope there's plenty more to come, that she's still writing once the wars are won. And if not, well, at least she can already say "I wanted to be pretty much what I eventually became".

4.5 rounded down

When I heard Rebecca Solnit was publishing a memoir this year it quickly became one of my most anticipated releases of 2020 - having enjoyed a number of her previous collections (including Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, The Faraway Nearby and Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises to name but a few) Solnit is one of my favourite living essayists.

And this is a very "Solnit" memoir. Rather than being a straight retelling of the formative events of her life thus far the reader learns about the author and how she has become the writer she is today through snippets of her past which are seamlessly weaved into writing in a style typical of her essays. A key theme is (duh) her identity, and how gender is inextricably linked to that - and how her experience of gender through her life as a white American woman in the 20th and 21st centuries has contributed to the writer she has become today. I found myself relating closely to a lot of what she said and ended up highlighting long sections of writing. There've been times in the past where I've felt that even though the topics she has chosen to write about are quite zeitgeist-y and the essays are published still in that moment that they already feel a bit passé, but I have to say I never felt that here.

Highly recommended to everyone, but I think those who are already fans of Solnit will enjoy this even more.

I received an advanced reader's copy in exchange for an honest review

Because I am humanly self-centered, this book made me think about my youth in Aughties Brooklyn and how I thought I knew everything but really didn't know everything. What i really did not know was how much of my life was trying to survive my experience as a young woman, and that this state of being was temporary, and how quickly this time would end, and I would become another thing, a no-longer young woman, a mother, a career woman, a wife, an NPR listener, and how I would miss the un-understanding of my struggle, without every wanting to go back. This book provides a great way to revist that time and think through all the things I never thought through, without actually having to be in my 20s in the city ever again. And for that, 5 hearty stars. Mwah.