Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,38

the world and take us into its heart, how a metaphor opens up a new possibility, a simile builds a bridge. They let me listen to conversations and thoughts that went deeper and expressed more than most people could face-to-face.

But they were not warm, they had no bodies to meet my body, and they would never know me. There was nonexistence in living through books as well as many other existences and minds and dreams to inhabit and ways of expanding one’s own imaginative and imaginary existence.

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It is as easy to decide to be a writer as to decide to have a piece of cake, but then you have to do it. I moved into that beautiful apartment as I was in my final semester of my undergraduate education at San Francisco State University. It was an intense spring: I was working to support myself and taking nineteen units of classes, helped along by a handful of prescription speed in the form of little yellow pills that had been the only gift given me by the man I’d been dating before I moved.

I graduated as I turned twenty, and then realized that the world and I were not ready for each other. I got a desk-clerk job a pleasant walk from home in a small hotel, out there on the edge of the Castro District in those last years before AIDS would change everything for the gay men who thronged the streets of the neighborhood. I stayed there for a restorative year of catching my breath and looking around and not being desperate for time or money. The job left a lot of time to read behind a rolltop desk, in between checking guests in and out and taking reservations by phone and mailing confirmations and sometimes making up beds or breakfast trays. There were troubles—a lecherous elderly boss, the sorrows of a refugee housekeeper whose husband beat her, a few crises with customers—but mostly it was peaceful.

After graduation, I had realized that though I had learned to read, I had not learned to write, or to do anything better than sales and service work for a living. In those days before nonfiction was considered creative and taught in writing programs, I applied to the only place that I could afford and that made sense to me, the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, and was admitted. The writing sample I submitted was a blithely amusing (but laboriously typed) account of an encounter with a group of women at a punk club when I was eighteen or nineteen.

The women had invited me to audition for a movie that turned out to be an attempt to repeat the process whereby they and the quadriplegic man who’d be the film’s director had groomed a teenage girl via sex work to obey him. They wanted to repeat the process only with a movie camera and with me; sex with him, the women explained, was part of the deal, and he chimed in by spelling out “show me your tits” on his communication board with his pointer. Servitude and obedience were described, of course, as liberation.

The Pygmalion myth, whereby a woman is turned from insensate sculpture into a living being, happens much more frequently in reverse, as a story of women who don’t need help being fully alive and aware confronted with the people who want to reduce them to something less. Perhaps in turning the encounter into an essay, I had affirmed my capacity to think, judge, speak, decide, and maybe thereby to make myself. I was going to graduate school to get better at those things.

I didn’t fit into the school well when I started it a few months after I turned twenty-one, because most of the other students seemed to want to be what the school wanted us to be: investigative journalists whose holy grail was the front page of the New York Times. They were more sophisticated about politics, older than me, consciously low key in their appearance while I was still flamboyantly punk rock in thrift-store black and crayoned-on eyeliner. I wanted to be a cultural writer, an essayist, though what exactly I wanted was not nearly as clear as what I did not want. I wanted to be pretty much what I eventually became, but there were not a lot of models and examples that I