Growing up in the city, Teitelbaum listened to tons of local legends like Patti Smith and the Velvet Underground.

“It ruined smaller shows for me.” She also remembers seeing Cher in Vegas, and being so moved that she kept a piece of confetti from the show. “I was like, ‘This is what a show is,” she says with a laugh. She discovered classic rock through her dad’s iPod: Dylan, Clapton, and the Stones, who were her first concert at Madison Square Garden in the mid-2000s. Teitelbaum was mostly raised by her single dad in midtown Manhattan, along with her older sister and twin brother (her dad remarried and had two more children, making her one of five). “There was a tweet, ‘Did you have a happy childhood or are you funny?’ It’s the same sentiment.”

Looking back, she describes how she came to recognize that her own experiences of harassment and menace were inseparable from the systemic problem of who has a voice, or rather who is heard and respected and who is silenced-and how she was galvanized to use her own voice for change.“It feels very Jewish to have that kind of humor involved in difficult subject matter,” she says. She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer-books themselves the gay community that presented a new model of what else gender, family, and joy could mean and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West.īeyond being a memoir, Solnit's book is also a passionate argument: that women are not just impacted by personal experience, but by membership in a society where violence against women pervades. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher, and of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself.

In Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. Longlisted for The Orwell Prize for Political WritingĪn electric portrait of the artist as a young woman that asks how a writer finds her voice in a society that prefers women to be silent, from the author of Orwell's Roses

Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography

Recollections of my nonexistence