Summary of Rebecca Solnit's Recollections of My Nonexistence

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

#1 I was always trying to disappear and appear, to be safe and to be someone, and those agendas were often at odds with each other. I was trying to read in the mirror what I could be and whether I was good enough.

#2 The mirror in which I saw myself disappear was in the apartment I had lived in for a quarter century, beginning in the last months of my teens. The first several years were the era of my fiercest battles, some of which I won, some of which left scars I still carry.

#3 The 5 Fulton bus line that runs from downtown San Francisco to the Pacific Ocean is a great place to start the story of me trying not to be a girl. The bus goes past the Jesuit church, down avenues of houses that get less and less densely populated as it travels west, and past the sea, which looks like a mirror of beaten silver on some days.

#4 Some gifts are given and neither giver nor recipient knows what their true dimensions are, and what they seem to be at first is not what they will be in the end. Like beginnings, endings have endless recessions, layers upon layers, and consequences that ripple outward.

© 2022 IRB Media (Ebook): 9781669381891

Release date

Ebook: 7 April 2022