Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,27

jokes about concentration camp victims and comparisons of me to famine victims, as though my body was itself a disaster zone).

There’s an austerity to thinness, to having a hard body, to being closer to the solidity of bone than the softness of flesh. It’s as though you’re removed from the messy, squishy, leaky business of life, as though you’re looking on from outside, from someplace less mortal, less malleable. As though you disdain mortality and the pleasures of the flesh. It’s an irreproachably stern way to show up. Which is to say that thinness is a literal armor against being reproached for being soft, a word that means both yielding, cushiony flesh and the moral weakness that comes from being undisciplined. And from consuming food and taking up space.

Women’s bodies are usually soft if they’re healthy, at least in some places, and if softness is equated to a moral failing, and virtue to a low-body-fat hardness of surface, then that’s another way in which to be a woman is to be wrong, one that people starve their way out of. Roxane Gay wrote in her book Hunger that “we should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men. . . . And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it’s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us.”

Maybe starvation is how you apologize for existing, or slip toward nonexistence, but I was not trying to make myself thin. I was already there, and I ate, but food wasn’t one of the main things I was hungry for. I was hungry for love, but that was so strange and foreign and terrifying a phenomenon I approached it obliquely and described it with euphemisms and fled from some versions and failed to recognize others. I was hungry for stories, books, music, for power, and for a life that was truly mine, hungry to become, to make myself, to distance myself as far as possible from where I was in my teens, to keep going until I arrived someplace that felt better.

Later in my twenties, an older man I was seeing said, “Baby, you’re driven,” and in that age when I threw out sharp replies without thinking, I said all too accurately, “And you’re parked.” I was driven, to redeem my existence by achievement, to keep going until I reached a better place (and when I did, the habit was too ingrained for me to slow down), to make something, to stop being what I was and become something else, to meet all the demands placed on me, and of course to meet everyone else’s needs first or instead. There was real joy in the creative and intellectual life, but also a withdrawal from all the other realms of life. I was like an army that had retreated to its last citadel, which in my case was my mind.

That physical diminution has its equivalents in how we live and move and act and speak or withdraw from doing so. Lacy M. Johnson writes of a relationship so controlling that, when she left him, the man built a padded room in which to rape and murder her and from which she escaped after the former and before the latter: “I tried diminishing myself in such a way that I wouldn’t provoke him, wouldn’t anger him, tried to bend myself according to his pleasure so that he would like everything I did and said and thought. It didn’t matter, because no matter what I did, it was never enough. I kept at it anyway, until there was almost nothing left of me, of the person I had been. And that person I became, who was barely a person of her own, is the version of me he liked best.”

Femininity at its most brutally conventional is a perpetual disappearing act, an erasure and a silencing to make more room for men, one in which your existence is considered an aggression and your nonexistence a form of gracious compliance. It’s built into the culture in so many ways. Your mother’s maiden name is often requested as the answer to a security question by banks and credit card companies, because it’s assumed her original name is secret,