Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,42

was also about masculinity and its parsimonious words packed in silences. It was a voice policing many things, and leaving a lot unsaid in the same way that the ironic poses favored by my family did. The tone that we were supposed to deploy as journalists sounded to me like that tone, though at least we were allowed to quote people who might be more expressive and emotional.

I wanted language that could be simple and clear when the subject required it, but sometimes clarity requires complexity. I believe in the irreducible and in invocation and evocation, and I am fond of sentences less like superhighways than winding paths, with the occasional scenic detour or pause to take in the view, since a footpath can traverse steep and twisting terrain that a paved road cannot. I know that sometimes what gets called digression is pulling in a passenger who fell off the boat. I wanted English to be an instrument on which many kinds of music could be played. I wanted writing that could be lavish, subtle, evocative, that could describe mists and moods and hopes and not just facts and solid objects. I wanted to map how the world is connected by patterns and intuitions and resemblances. I wanted to trace the lost patterns that came before the world was broken and find the new ones we could make out of the shards.

Some Uses of Edges

1

It’s written in pencil on a large sheet of now-yellowed newsprint whose bottom half has the wide-ruled lines for beginning writers, and I’m pretty sure it’s my first essay, from first grade. In its entirety, it reads, “When I grow up I will never get married.” The illustration on the top half shows a man in a red shirt whose black hair wraps like a nimbus around his circular head and a yellow-haired woman in a flounced purple skirt. “Get married with me,” he says in a cartoon balloon, and she says, “No, no.”

It’s comic and horrible, a sign that I was looking at my mother’s life and thinking that whatever I did, I would try to not do what she did, because she so clearly felt trapped and powerless in a violently miserable marriage. I am the offspring of a victim and her victimizer, of a story that couldn’t be told at the time. Most conventional stories for girls and young women ended in marriage. Women vanished into it. The end. And then what happened and who were they? The fairy tale “Bluebeard” is about a woman who finds out, by disobeying his orders and using the forbidden key to unlock the torture chamber full of her predecessors’ corpses, that she’s married a serial killer, whose intent to kill her is whetted by her knowledge. It’s an unusual fairy tale in that she survives and he does not.

I’d just rejected the principal story for women, and I’d soon elect to try to put myself in charge of stories. That is, the same first year of literacy, after a brief period when I wanted to be a librarian because they spent their days with books, I realized someone actually wrote each book, and decided that that’s what I wanted to do. Such an unwavering goal from early on simplified my path, though the task of writing is never simple. Becoming a writer formalizes the task that faces us all in making a life: to become conscious of what the overarching stories are and whether or not they serve you, and how to compose versions with room for who you are and what you value.

But when it comes to writing, every chapter you write is surrounded by those you don’t, every confession by what remains secret or indescribable or unremembered, and only so much of the chaos and fluidity of experience can be sifted and herded onto pages, whatever your intentions and even your themes. You’re not carving marble; you’re grabbing handfuls of flotsam from a turbulent river; you can arrange the detritus but you can’t write the whole river. Though so much of the stories of those who came before is missing, I understand now how the deep damage passed down from my grandparents formed my parents, and how public histories shaped our private lives in various ways. I’ve lived long enough to know five generations of my family and to see how the weight of history that happened two