Transcripts For CSPAN2 Rebecca Solnit Recollections Of My Nonexistence 20240713

Readers. Good evening, welcome to murmur. I am stephanie valdes, coowner of humidity bookstore and m b, its also a hardcore indie bookstore crowd. Tonight were thrilled to welcome Rebecca Solnit on the publication date of her new book recollections of my nonexistence. She will be in conversation with Leslie Jamison area is no that there will not be assigning tonight after the event but Rebecca Solnit did arrive early to sign each and every one ofyour books. So Rebecca Solnit is the author of 20 books including a field guide to getting lost, the faraway nearby, a paradise built in hell, river shadows and wanderlust. A history of walking. She is also the author of essays on feminism, activism and social change, hope and also the climate crisis. A product of the California Public Education System in kindergarten to graduate school shes a regular contributor to the guardian. Leslie jamison is the author of the New York Times that sellers recovering and the empathy exam and the novel gin clock. Shes a contributing writer for New York Times right magazine and her work has appeared in publications including the atlantic, harpers, New York Times book review, oxford american and virginia quarterly review. She regret she lives in brooklyn with her family. Please help me welcome Rebecca Solnit and Leslie Jamison. [applause] before we start in earnest i want to say im not doing a book signing afterwards because theres a more Perfect Technology for people to handle objects before i handle other peoples objects has never been invented and were in a global pandemic. I also want to say what i am canceling most of the tour for the next couple of weeks because its the responsible thing to do and i want you all to wash your hands and i want to use and is either and i want you to not touch anything and dont sneeze or cough on anybody and just be really careful. Those of us who are healthy and robust and have options have an obligation to exercise that utmost care for those who are more fragile. And so i just decided last week i wasnt going to sign books in assigning line because of germs and the pandemic is clearly, whats that rumbling, is this a sign or is it a sign or a subway . Is that like the ultimate new york question . So i wasnt worried about my health but i didnt want to be running around the country being a vector and i didnt want to be an occasion for large gatherings as they are being banned so that the pandemic conversation which may intersect with the recollections of my nonexistence conversation i just wanted to make that psa and im going to read a little bit and sit down with leslie to whom i am so grateful for paying so much attention and coming up with such fantastic questions for our conversation. This is just a little bit of the beginning of the book. One day long ago i looked at myself as i faced a fulllength mirror and saw my image darken and soften and then seemed to retreat as i though i was vanishing from the world rather than my mind wasshutting it out. I fitted myself on the doorframe across the hall from the mirror and my legs crumbled under me. My own image drifted away into darkness as if i were a ghost aiding from my own site. I blacked out occasionally and had dizzy spells often in those days but this time was memorable because it appeared as though the world wasnt vanishing from my consciousness but that i was vanishing from the world. I was the person who was vanishing and the disembodied person washing her from a distance, both and neither and in those days i was trying to disappear and appear, trying to be safe and to be someone and those agendas were often at odds with each other and i was watching myself to see if i could read in the mirror what i could be and whether i was good enough and whether all the thingsive been told about myself were true. To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all those things at once. The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most political topic in the world said Edgar Allan Poe who must not have imagined it from the perspective of women who prefer to live. I was trying to not be the subject of someone elses poetry and not to get killed. I was trying to find a poetics of my own with no mats, no guides, not much to go on the red they might have been out there but i hadnt located them yet. The struggle to find a poetry in which your survival rather than your defeat is celebrated, perhaps to find your own voice, to insist upon that or at least to find a way to survive amidst an fos that relishes your erasures and failures is worked at many and perhaps most youngwomen have to do. In those early years i did not do a particularly well or clearly but i did it ferociously. [applause] thank you for being here, rebecca. Its really wonderful to be, to have the chance to talk to you and to get to all of us and it was wonderful to hear the beginning of the book in your voice. I was wondering, where in a strange time and theres a lot that i want to ask you about the book on its own but i guess in the couple of days leading up to this event ive been thinking about the ways in which some of the ideas in this book, particularly ideas about how Community Functions and how art rises out of community and how identity rises out of community. They feel like they this moment in particular ways but i was curious, maybe i thought we could start with how youve been thinking about the present moment we are in, thinking about contagion and health and the ways we might care for each other, how some of those very urgent realities at the moment are spoken to by the book or the book or whether they are connections feel present for you . The tragedy of epidemics is that in ordinary disasters, earthquakes and hurricanes, if authority and racism dont muck it up too much people come together in amazing ways as they did in Hurricane Sandy here in and 9 11 much more so than anybody really reflected at the time as we let the Bush Administration i think i can say hijack the meaning of that event and the idea that we all have to be separate to be safe is not just complicated when it gets so close to zeno phobia and you know, as we sit here in a synagogue weird ideas about purity and although im excited to be in a synagogue and especially a synagogue that had nick cave playing a minute ago and whats interesting to me is im understanding we have to be separate to be together, that being separate is how we take care of each other. Were going to separate ourselves in various ways out of solidarity and how do we communicate that and its interesting, its almost the antithesis of what happened to me as a youngwoman. I remember realizing at a certain point why wasnt i political when i was young and realizing to be political you have to feel like you have something in common with other people and that you have power and i started out with neither of those things and obviously and it up with plenty of both but it was a journey but every crisis is partly a storytelling crisis. How do we tell the story that were doing, not because other people are bad and we must but because we care aboutthem. How do we tell the story that we are separated physically because we are coming together. And its virtually, socially as a society and how do we do it when the institutions that should have laid the groundwork to do this right have failed us profoundly as the Trump Administration has economically in terms of managing the cdc, the information flow and the rest. Theres a lot to say from what you just said but i think theres something really subtle and vital about the role that narrative can play in framing separateness as a form of care rather than a form of fear mongering or scapegoating or distancing and that even just starting to talk about it in that way that separateness is a way we are trying to care each other rather than protect ourselves is an important framework to put out there. Thinking about care rather than protection orsomething like that. Is also going to be interesting because were such a profoundly unequal society. Some of us have Great Health Care coverage. Some of us have none. Some people can tell you telecommute from home and some people are gig workers who will lose their apartment if they dont show up and work even if they are worried , even if they are sick and theres been a bunch of people, this is not my original point , noting that a better case for medicare for all, paid sick leave and a bunch of other stuff could not be made by this pandemic which i think also makes a great case for Elizabeth Warren family. My people. You know, saying really smart things about the pandemic and economic crisis last month and saw it coming. So when of course Elizabeth Warren could be a beautiful segway to the fear and loathing andsilencing of women in the american society. I was going to pick up on something you said just a few minutes ago about how when you were a young woman thinking about what meant it political to that to you then, that you felt neither did you have power were neither were you touched by a feeling of having things in common and i was connecting that to a portion of what you read where you talk about one of the core ideas of the book that to be a young woman is to face anapproximate fear and annihilation and those things maybe think about one of the compelling origin stories in the book that i thought thwould be a great point of departure which is the story of your writing this, the sort of concrete literal space of the writing comes from and you tell the story and im hoping you might share with us but of receiving a desk as a gift from a friend who had experienced trauma and you say i wonder if everything i have ever written is a counterweight to that attempt to reduce young woman to nothing. And so i wonder if you could tell us the story about that desk and how it affected the writing that happened on it. The book has a mildstart after that opening passage. Its the sunday after Ronald Reagans inauguration, the moment when the economy was going to turn away from the new deal and the Great Society and the social safety net and become a monster that now destroyed so many lives in this country and i was househunting. My parents had cut me off a few years before. I was 19, i was really poor and i was looking trin want ads for the cheapest apartments in San Francisco and there was a 200 a month apartment and i called the number and the building manager told me to look at it and i made an appointment so i start with this story thats also a positive story about a complete stranger, an old black man who saw how much i wanted this apartment in a place of my own and went out on a limb to make it possible for me to have it. Ib. In in a society that would not acknowledge existence of the silent except byot telling me tt it just had to change, i do accept it as a given and adapt myself to the fact lots of men want to kill and harm and tortured and a great and intimidate and insult women all the time. And what not going to do a damn thing about it. Youd just need to not go there and not do this and not be out and not talk to these people and not wear that dress, you know, the endless litany of things women are not supposed to because amend that end up coming in her life so much. The chapter a segue from the pleasant stuff about my apartment with my writing desk and describing it. It was given to me right after moved into the apartment by a friend of mine i had known for a few years. Who had left her boyfriend figure before and to punish her for daring to leave them, daring to choose what she needed rather than he n wanted. He stabbed or 15 15 times and t to death your and because somebody came along, because there was an ambulance come , because there were transfusions of hospital she didnt die. All of the police blamed her and everyone blamed her for what happened and there was also no justice. So she moved far away back to San Francisco, gave me the desk that a a been given to her by womanhood been evicted. This is one of the interesting things about writing is that it makes me look harder, go deeper and everything ive ever written, i write in chairs, on airplanes, in bed, you know. I writely anywhere but mostly ie written at the desk since i was 19. It was only when writing this book relates everything ive written has, everything above written has been written on a platform given to me by a woman a manan tried to silence forever and, therefore, i can think everything ive ever written which was pretty early on about feminism and my punk magazine cover story 1985 and wanderlust and so may think since then has been a counter to the tip to make women nobodyto and nothing and didd an silent and powerle. And that was kind of shocking, you know. Now i know i cant get a bigger desk either. For a while. While. Or that you have been writing on a really big desk the whole time. Thats a great way to think about it. The desk has been bigger than you. The desks legs go all the way down to the bottom of the story. I was thinking about how sort of you make choices around what that writing involves and i think certainly for me as an admirer of your work and somebody whos been really influenced by your work im sure i speak for many people when i talk about that admiration, one of the things i love the most is the way that you are work totally raises distinctions between what it means to talk about the personal and political and the counterweight youre describing very much involves invoking both in trying to document the kind of constant conversation between the personal and political. I was really struck by a moment in this book when you describe coming out of this background as an undergrad was more focused on journalism and shifting or pivoting away from the more objective language of reportage or kind of the mode of the oped toward trying to find a more personal language that could get i wonder if you could talk a little bit about what that evolution was like away from the sort of objective editorial journalistic mode not that you have banded the methods of reportage but claiming the role that the personnel could play in the political import the choice to invoke the personal in your work, how both how thats evolved for you over the years and how you think about that question of invoking the personal. aball of us speak from a particular place that has to do with who we are and values and consequences. Because before that there was such a sense of something neutral and objective which is usually white and usually male and usually pretending to some weird rationality. But what i was really doing back then and 80s was writing in three different veins, trained as a journalist actually abi was doing journalistic work, writing working as an art critic or you sue authoritative tone but its personal and your opinion but its very extra light these are my opinions and associations but not this is my inmost story. Then i was writing much more personal lapidary essays and it just felt like three things that were really far apart and then it was actually being an activist that changed everything. We so often talk about activism as a kind of broccoli you should eat because its good for you with implication a [laughter] a lot of the best things that ever happened to me came to me and the best people that ever happened to me in the 1988 i started going to the annual spring actions begun by franciscans were more than 9000 Nuclear Bombs had been detonated experiences that became part of it comes up later. It was such an extraordinary experience. You had mormon down windows atomic veterans, nuclear physicist, japanese survivors of atomic bombs dropped there and japanese buddhist monks, these wonderful franciscan priests and nuns who were radicals. Lesbian and separatist payday guess because of still 80s. Scary tiedyed guys who kept trying to hug you. But it was abwe were dealing with the rehearsals for the end of the world and this dusty remote place very few people had ever seen was where the cold war was being enacted. It was also western shoshone land i became very involved in the western shoshone land rick stargell which was one of the most transformative and eyeopening and wonderful things that ever happened to me. I did a few things for them but they did so much for me. It was the complexity of all the layers of meeting western attitudes toward the desert, the history of civil disobedience from throw through gandhi antinuclear activism all these other layers ia realized they needed every tool i had that meant journalism, critical analysis, you can actually take the tools you use for criticism and apply them to the politics of the nonrepresentation of native people. The representation of Nuclear Weapons and war and the coded masculinity that an anthropologist was decoding in new among nuclear physicist. You could use all those tools but also the personal experience. What is it like standing in handcuffs watching the most beautiful sunset in the world in a kettle pin with 500 people who care about the same things you do. I realize that, i bought into the idea this was three different kinds of writing but could all be one kind of writing. And at the personal voice experiential thing was it like to actually be in this place. What is it like to camp next to a nuclear crater. What is it like to be handcuffed and driven 70 miles in these rituals of arrest . Was it like to unlearn the versions of western history that so erased native americans . Was it like to drive to join the indian wars in the 1990s manifestations. So that was actually probably my one big literary breakthrough was, they all belong together and then predicts my second butch savage dreams. So, in a way your answer to the question enact the very thing you are describing by invoking those particular examples of being handcuffed and that cattle pen and watching that beautiful sunset 500 people who care about the same things you do. It gives me chills anyway that feels quite related to what youre saying. There is a beautiful passage in the book where you describe a long essay about so much of this book as people are getting is about you coming of age as a writer and not just comingofage one but comingofage over and over again. You talk about adulthood as a constant process of evolution rather than a single threshold to reach but you describe trying to work on this essay about walking alone at night and you say you are looking for a way to wed the poetics of what you wanted with the politics of what obstructed you from having it or reaching it. I was so struck by the desire to wed the poetics of desire with the kind of politics of obstruction it made me think about the role of poetics. I was curious to hear you speak to as it moves through this book. What role you think beauty has come of the production of beauty, the production of beautiful language. The particular articulation of outrage or injustice. What role does beauty play in that project . Works on a great later literary influences is abyou saved us from the hideous clichcs of marxism warned over moldy casserole in the back of the refrigerator marxism. And gave us this poetic language that was grounded as girls people are in metaphor and flowers and animals. Theres a sense that politics is ugly and impersonal and very separate from beauty. Somebody asked me what was the last book that made you cry and i hardly ever cry over sad things but something so noble so generous so hopeful can make me tear up. I feel like theres a kind of emotional beauty and generosity its actually one of the kinds of beauty im really interested in. To be a really awesome preschool teacher your whole life is Beautiful Department is small. I think, what was that . [laughter] yay, teachers, i salute you. My sisterinlaw is an amazing middle school teacher, my aunt was a kindergarten teacher. I have so much respect for teachers. Necessarily, you know, often displays of brute power are very impressive and so he was really kind of like twisting a knife in the social world of the conflict between power and violence and the good in some ways. And to learn so much from him. Being an art critic as a young woman meant i got to work with these amazing artists who taught me so much. But i think you have beautiful things. Theres also a kind of b left wg here im chewing this over because it comes at me from all directions. Theres a leftwing ideas we shouldnt have anything nice until after the revolution when everyone has something nice, and its like there willl always be suffering a nice things incompatible with being passionate to the liberation of all beings and universal human rights. And you know, not necessarily the yachts i want preschool teacher to nice dresses and good dishes from an amazing rummage sale. [laughing] likeam me. I was thinking that when you describing that hypothetical preschool teachers morel Beautiful Life and possibly very small apartment, iif was thinkig that maybe her apartment isnt so small in the same way your writing isnt small, maybe, maybe both of these things hold multitudes. Theres a way which connect the idea like somehow being ethical or pursuing ethics in ones life in ones writing isin a necessay incompatible with the beauty. W. One of the things that i loved about reading this book is your attention to various kinds of pleasure. You are attentive to the pleasures of friendship of urban living like the devotion you felt around you this beautiful scene where you describe being part of a piece of performance art. You can tell the full story but sitting with your hand in the jar. Yes. The book at its core is about feeling graham of that ambient violence that surrounds women everywhere all the time. I think of it in some ways as the anti memoir because so often to tell the story this way is what happens to you , happens to you personally so that you could overcome it and you know this is the story if you are poor, if you cant pay the mortgage or in debt it is your own damn fault rather than the system being stacked against you. And then to learn to cope with the fact a lot of men want to harm and kill people like me. But i wanted to convey the story because in the context of a society that dont want any of us to have a voice so what gets you through that . First of all i spent a lot of time alone reading and writing and also that point of the book i didnt even know how to connect to people and somehow i ended up having really good friends which became part of the story and the conversation in the collaboration the way we supported each other and made work that influenced each other as a part of it. So also what got me through tha that. And all those things that tried to silence and how central voices are. And to the possible silence in a society were women have equal access to the law or the courts et cetera. That violence would be almost impossible Harvey Weinstein may have been stronger than some of those women but the fact he was stronger and in control of the narrative that let him get away with it for 40 years. And then when the narrative changes that is why he never imagine that they would come. I wanted to be visceral and personal and thats a beautiful stuff and some of it is so horrifically ugly another pandemic we have not dealt with enough many people have done wonderful things with feminism and women shelters which i hope someday we live in a world that is so nonviolent that we dont have houses where women and children hid from men and have to disappear from their violence like a bizarre scene from a wounded society. But i wanted to convey the particulars of my life and the generalities of the life that we all live in so intent on destroying women in so many way ways. So little discussed and as part of the silence i wanted to break that silence with this book. I meandered there. No. Makes me feel at home. I had someone always told me i speak in paragraphs. The way you answer questions are beautiful because you have the strands but then they are all necessary and converge. Something you were saying about your book as the anti memoir in a particular way to push back against the idea ones own story somehow exist in isolation or is only personal. Also that you are personally responsible for resolving a problem and an individual man who is abusive you can do whatever it takes to overcome a traumatic experience but we live in a society where these things happen there is a beating once every nine or 12 seconds and also it didnt happen to you well violence against women is violent and there is no guarantee it wont happen to me. But also the woman is an island. I felt so impacted by the fact i read about violence in the news every day i am so impacted by what happened to my friend, the fact my mother was a battered woman, these little girls who are my nieces and my friends kids worry about what will happen to them. Because we also tell the story that happens to you personally if you are a victim of violence or you have not and we really understand around racism and what could happen to you. We dont understand enough around gender violence or racism either. And hearing how that could cause diabetes and hypertension which are huge Health Things in this country. And i wanted to open a conversation if you like we have never had what does it mean to live in a society where you have to think about the fact that people want to kill you all the time. Was starting to hear those stories from women. And a woman told me how her university thought they wanted to focus on the stockers needs and a woman who prepared herself how to go numb when she was raped. Wall you werent raped when everything was fine during the formative years imagine people doing horrific things to you. But does have an impact what does it do to our psyche . There is no single extreme after violence as an adult but i am a person with the threats but all these things would happen to me so what we now understand as ptsd and then to diagnose coming home from war rarely diagnosed and not even discussed so it much more commonly impact survivors of rape and the iraq war vet wrote a book about ptsd from the ied in iraq and how actually the violence is higher of those that were in war so what does that say about our society we have not even gotten there to talk about that yet because the experiences are so ordinary and we are all impacted by this, whatever our gender or our role so we still need to talk about a better and go deeper to understand we are all impacted by living in the world in which these things happen to so many people because we are queer or nonwhite or not male not adult and not powerful. And that toll is immense it is almost impossible it is such a stretch to imagine a society to be feel free and confident and safe and valued but take it as the north star to direct all of our political movements. We were talking in the back but you have to me, where at one point in the book that you are moving through the world and maybe you follow in one fall into the water trauma than thinking about it you do fall in the water or you dont. Maybe we should recognize that. The framing is part the bad thing happen to you and then the rest of your story is how you climbed out of the water. What if there is no dry land . It is not my job to adapt to violence against women it is unacceptable they will never adapt by accepting it. [applause] that i will never escape it. I have been doing this thing for a while friends of the Guardian Newspaper and you know those things how many of the squares have crosswalks prove that youre not a robot. How do these stories are violence against women . The story with trump and weinstein but all with the women protest yesterday. But five out of seven are violence against women so it is not my job to adapt to accept the unacceptable and that the only adequate solution is profound social change and that is what feminism is here for and why i am here for feminism. And you know isnt that a voice and why i am right like fund im appear in the triumph is that around 2012 the slowgrowing subterranean force to be so powerful open the space to have this conversation nobody would have with me when i was young facing constant harassment and started to have this amazing transformative conversation resulted in new york and california active positive consent laws. And suddenly out of nowhere october 2017 it started in 2012 as a result of 15 years of feminism with the groundwork women judges and University President s for those to decide newspapers and tvs and listening to women in ways they have never before that comes out of 150 years of feminism and one of my favorite human beings ever wrote about the french revolution writing a book about the rising women in the 17 nineties so no it didnt start in 2017. [laughter] and with the crisis to be represented as a tree but how did we get here genealogy is not a pedigree how the suffrage influence gandhi to invent with the civil disobedience after reading our local guide which became an influence on Martin Luther king and then to launch occupy and to open the conversation why the Democratic Party is forced to be. And then to be connected and then the ways to think generationally it is generational and then to have deeper roots i will open it up in a minute or two there are so many questions i will ask one or two more i wrote a book of questions. But i know there will be some thoughtful questions from everybody else. But i will ask one more before i turn it over. It kept going back among other things not everything that lies ahead one of the conditions that you describe at one point losing a job as a away trust one a waitress in a restaurant and then you say you were grateful because it led to everything and in particular and then that led to your first book. But i love to that particular narrative as a failure or obstruction that led to all of these things. I am curious to hear you speak either in the book are outside of it, other failures or disappointments that you feel grateful for or rejections. Im not good at very many things and am socially awkward person and i feel that i met people who are charming and multitalented who gets bread really thin charming hundreds of people dining out on their charm and that dabbling a little bit i was good at one thing growing up i was incredibly lucky because i always wanted to write but because i was so bad at Everything Else it was like the channel their road and i wasnt a broad meandering Prairie River by the fire hose. [laughter] because you see people who were good at things and get seduced by them. Im glad i got out of the Service Industry young because i got a museum job doing research which taught me about modern art which led to a job ad and art museum. And i think there are things we are good at. I have seen people who are charming who get caught up they dont know where they have forgotten what they want so somebody could write that was very intentional Cambridge University to take divinity orders and become a minister according to the families and he played hooky and walked across france in 1790 at the height of the french revolution. But the way he failed at Everything Else to be the poet he was meant to be. So its really hard some of it was accidental i left my last job in 1988 i thought it was temporary and i would get another one and i havent gotten around to it yet. [laughter] but it was this thing and i wanted to be a writer writing 500 word things are 1000 word things which is really ambitious and then i got my first book contract 1988 and i was terrified and i psych myself up by saying, okay a chapter is like an essay i know how to write an essay. So i write books that i think are together but they are like essay collections but because nobody had big ambitions for me, also i have seen young white man that will write the Great American novel which will be so fucking great that they cannot write anything but the modern journalism and that i would write a little bit more so it wasnt a failure exactly but incrementalism which gets a bad word but thats of things happen. So i let myself go along to the next thing and the next thing in the next book was a historical narrative and then it taught me how i would really write the second book which is a narrative shifting in tone and focus from more objective history to firstperson experience to weave that all together and i was off and running. It struck me when you were describing the incremental work in various forms it all led to that breakthrough. Also about the genealogy about the anti memoir that ties back to the pandemic come im interested in how things are connected. Part of my anti memoir is my last book is a different kind of anti memoir i wanted to say we are made out of stories that imprison us they create us in the stories that breakdown or the stories that rise up in a moment of crisis. And that brings us stories of people that we would never meet and the lifejackets that we are in the narrative throw and skin is not our boundary. And the same way we are connected this is about what happened to me happened to so many women and the change that has to happen is a change we do together so to feel connected which is coming to feel this could be changed and stuff. And the epidemic is also how we need to do this thing together. Nobody will stop the epidemic but if everybody does what we are supposed to do you can washing and not touching things or dont touch your face. Right now dont touch her face. [laughter] dont expose fragile people to unnecessary risk. You all know that. But we are all in this together the epidemic will be overcome by everybody doing the right thing. Also what is interesting if we do what we need to do that was a lot of fuss about nothing because we dont want mass death and hospitals because they are overwhelmed are massive quantities it will look like nothing and you can see that in the statistics the decline of violence and the decline of the catastrophe the prisoners who were not executed so if everybody does the right thing in this country we will not be italy and the pandemic that did not become catastrophic but because of 1 million tiny decisions everybody was making. With that importance of narrative not just in absence and of that incremental decisions you were describing. And then to prep for boundaries so i wonder if we could open it up. Here is microphone right here. Rose and geranium oil i recommend it highly. I come from a family his patriarch is named patricia and her daughter is also named patricia as is her daughters daughter i would ask your advice how to navigate that and all the wisdom and fuck you energy that i need. It is okay. We are not in a rush. My question is. Could you this moment i need all the wisdom and fuck you energy. Would yall like us to shout fuck you . Fuck you. Not knowing the person in question but lets do fuck you patriarchy as a collective. Everybody ready . Fuck you patriarchy. Wrap around it and send it to the white house and those peoples whose boundaries are so tight you who wrote a book the complete ability other than profit matters. And that failure matters. Okay. We could say fuck you. I touch that. Sorry. [laughter] stand back. Speaking of patriarchy. Your work is important to me with feminist text and structurally and then to have an asterisk next to it. On the gender queer scales so how do we coalesce multiple people under the umbrella of feminism and then to include more people in the fight to do together. I have been so rooted in the patriarchy rooted in the evil. Way we say working on native american and Hurricane Katrina and new orleans and feminism is a subset of human rights and we want them for everyone. Part of this book i wanted to write an essay for years and years called thank you gave men. On gay men. The queer city in america and i am so proud of that. I was so proud for the San Francisco that was. I grew up there also. What the men were modeling to what these queer people were modeling for me we dont have to accept our gender assignment. It is totally worth it to break the rules. There will be punishment but it is worth it. And i feel like if we dont talk about it this is down to the personal game and my Gay Liberation and black people want antiracism but with that example you learn so much through the struggle through feminism and gender vocabulary and that is being worked on on the very moment with the work in progress and the wonderful ones keep emerging but what feminism has been theres no rules to what it means to be a woman your genitals are not your destiny your parents intentions are not your destiny they dont determine your destiny so we all belong anywhere we want to be so what i got to write about several years ago in a way that samesex marriage became possible so what exactly is the defensive marriageable shed about long bullshit about . Like jack and bob getting married doesnt compare but the defense of traditional marriage it is a hierarchical relationship in which the man is dominant and the woman is subordinate. Feminist dismantle that is some way and it should be between equals and there are these intersections and a lot of the key feminist of the seventies were lesbians and not doing conventional marriage. Because as more people think it is a negotiable equal relationship it is more more possible even for straight people to imagine every consenting adult to marry the people that they love. But the dialogue could be smarter, more conscious or open. Do you want to see it specifically . I have been wondering for a long time as ive read your books and it adheres to a lot of the mentality it could be trans exclusive so i dont know how one i dont have the answer answers. Its interesting how much the last five or ten years have opened the question how we will think about gender and the complex that are intended to each other and just paying attention to trans rights and issues and making space for them everyone who knows me on social media and knows i am the third biggest Elizabeth Warren in the world but she said more about trans rights than other candidates. And said well run for president together is so interesting to see how different the conversation had become so what i also say is it is great the country addresses the problem it doesnt mean we got to the finish line, but its all on the table in a different way and i think thats exciting. But i feel blessed to have grown up around queer women and queer men i was one neighborhood away and just to have the person the kids between 13 and 18 was a gay man. I benefited so greatly from it just like i benefited from parts of the struggle and part of how i want to change the story is the idea of how we are connected and benefit from each others benefits from each others liberation and experience and thinking. And that morally we shouldnt just care about people exactly like ourselves but imagine we have so much to gain from the other points of view and experiences and identity. Thank you for letting me ramble around. Hi. I guess related to that and with the other movements and writers and to quote such an appropriate Kindred Spirit shout out. This is a simple question but to have dinner with any three people that would be serious candidates i am just questioning from your end who would you want at your table that you find it incredibly empathetic and brilliant . Current living humans . I had carmen maria, some may continue actually im supposed to do an event in San Francisco and it will be broadcast may 11 so we have had a number of long walks mostly talking about feminism but how it relates to feminism which is Everything Else. [laughter] and it is just so smart and brilliant and tough and the way she work herself out of the shitty rolls the hollywood gives and how she is the creator and boss is a story so thank you for bringing her up. And i will talk with mary beard and i cannot tell you how excited i am. Maybe the conversation will switch to latch and ill be out of my depth but she is a lovely person and she has been so bad ass writing about feminism. I really feel we are in a golden age for both feminist thinking and writing and we dont need to envy them because the writers and thinkers and activists that are alive right now the woman that started black lives matter this is the worst time to live and why i am a climate activist but it is also the golden age to formulate the tools and ideas and i feel really lucky with the company that i keep. So thank you for letting me go into that. I have a question of the people raising and discussing the things i have never felt before or the empathy for things i have never set out loud and other people are thinking the same thing i would be interested to hear i did not know then what i know now or the feeling that time has been lost or there could be made different behavior. I think middleage for me is an acceptance that we progress through mistakes and we have to make those mistakes to learn to change. Also in the beginning the book i say i dont envy people anymore who have amazing awesome families and they have the values that are what they have now and didnt have to make mistakes to learn anything or change anything or run away and reinvent themselves. I feel like if i have one great stroke of luck commits the instability that allows me to continue to evolve and change and say thats not who i want to be your how i want to be treate treated. And a stronger here or there but one of the things that i learned and they are things we already know but it is on our phone we are not living according to them and those are people who were full of mockery that you were told you dont have a sense of humor if you dont take your stride it took me well into my thirties to say actually, actually, leaving aside Major Political figures, dont want to mock people or be cruel to people are be around people who do that. Ingests kindness as a criteria that enters into this book with the concept maybe i should be treated well. But there are so many things like that. It is easy to tell the story of how it could have been better you couldve skipped the phase but it always feels like a process to me you could do this and this is a culture that wants shortcuts so often the long and direct path is the only way you get there. A big thing in my book wanderlust the in the labyrinth almost directly to the center and then you have to turn your back to continue to face every possible direction and you do all the stuff and then you truly arrive and then the real question of the left is that you dont stay there. How will you exit. So i like the meandering path. [laughter] we will not have a so were not going to have a chance in new york to vote for Elizabeth Warren because sheshe dropped out. Are you endorsing another candidate . Ive suddenly turned into Elizabeth Warren and ill tell you later. [laughing] i have to say your winker of a mayor who you would think would have other things to do with tweeting Elizabeth Warren today and if you like the whole way of being framed that the later has to go serve a man, i have a really big problem with. [applause] you know, like yeah, i want a green new deal, i want medicare for all. That might suggest some leanings. I think she does, too, but theres also so much strategy to it. Is it inn politics to endorse te person was not going to win, does a competent things for the winter . She didnt endorse anybody in the primary last time. I think shes under zero obligation and night is anybody else this time. And like aoc, you lucky people who live more less vaguely in proximity to her district, i from nancy pelosi district but only one district over from barbara lee want to say i will support whoever the hell winds of this bizarre crazy thing thats left us with two very elderly gentleman that began with all these vibrant young energetic women and people of color, but you know, shit is weird. [laughing] and thats probably more than i should have said. Lets take one question that does not invoke bernie and biden. At least. I just want to thank both of you for speaking, first of all. This has been validating and seem confident and started when speaking in having a room of people who are also adding to that importance in some way. But i p wanted to start with something because the other day my roommates andy i were talkig about what the world would look like if women were taught of the congressmen were taught. I think im always trying to teach my selfconfidence in certain ways, and i think more often than not women i used to teach a feminist bike class and these women feminist bike maintenance class and it was crazy because with all these women, but w we needed the presence of women and women demonstrating to show that this is something women can do and it was this mantra and weeds to start the class, we used to read the gospel in knoxville, tennessee, just so you know, but i also wanted to have a comment because you and i met when i was working at a bookstore in paris. Were always messaging each other afterwards, are you accumulating . We always still talk likethis. And first i would like to tell you that you gave me validation and i wrote my first novel about violence against women in the southeast and i just wanted to see what you are daily mantra or daily routine is to bring women in the cost i find myself trying to reach out to women like, whats your daily mantra for women . I dont know that i have a daily mantra. I have many aphorisms ive made up but they are all situational. I want to go back to talking about confidence though because i dont think we need to we all know the tshirt that says god, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man and nothing against white men are mediocre, but there are many marginalized and oppressed people suffer from less confidence than they should have. Any people in opposite situations suffer from more confidence than they should have my essay men explain things is about men who feel entitled to explain things without finding out if the person theyre talking to understand it, without grasping that theydont. So i think overconfidence just like, and this is a book about what it means to not have avoice. Harvey weinsteins victims didnt have enough voice to get him arrested and prosecuted for all those years. He had too muchvoice. I often think there is a meeting in the middle, speaking of the wonders of getting over gender and categories. 80s feminism was also my liberation meeting being like men and i think theres confidence, theres not overconfidence and we just wanted to say you see people who are confident about what they are stdoing. I think doubts can be auseful thing. Theres a happy amount of it where its like , is this where i am, is this what i want to be doing . There ability to question yourself can be constructive but im so glad to know that i succeeded in one of my missions in life which is to encourage young women. A woman i was with, my step great niece is doing great at ucmerced. Is the daughter of a single mom who had to raise her younger siblings because her mom worked three jobs to keep them housed and going toparis was a great dream in life. She wants to be a pediatrician and i believe shes actually going to make it even though shes the kind of person youd look at, teenage mom, teenage single mom, people would expect much of and it was so exciting to travel with her. Everything was new to her and i could go to paris. I did some book signing, book tours and i could have been super snooty, i have to go to europe and the book tour and be with somebody so full of wonder and at a Shakespeare Company so full of great people was wonderful thank you for bringing that back. I will text her tonight and tell her our pass cross again and congratulations on your novel. [applause] are we getting time or didyou want to take one question . The ladies, the last lady has a chance for sure. Thank all of you for standing up and you all can collect your books signed by a person who both washed and sprayed her hands before she signed them and didnt touch her face. And ill say thank you to you all after this and thank you to my amazing publicist maia sarah who put together the most amazing tour i could everdream of and im kind of devastated we dont get to do it. And to my coeditor paul whos been my editor since 1993 which is the most longterm monogamy ive ever observed. Messed ough i have around with other publishing houses but we wont talk about that. Longterm commitments, we could say. The story about your friend handing the writing desk to you means a lot to me. I want to be thinking about the wave the way im becoming like my mother and the things i inherit from the women in my family or the women around me and before i can ahead and explain it is always assumed not to be pleasant because of the violence women group up with preparing themselves for , my question to you is what do you think you inherit from the women around you and the women in your family . Thats a tough question because one of my grandmothers was supposed to be a paranoid schizophrenic but i think she just may have had severe Refugee Program whole that caused ptsd and she was probably from what i know from other relatives, my mother was a battered woman but it is interesting because my mother in some ways was a feminist and in some ways was as a friend of mine who was my best friend for a long time and then dated a brother of mine for two weeks and saw my brothers treatment of her completely changed because my mother was boy crazy but the faraway nearby is about my very troubled and challenging relationship with my mother who died in two 2012 but when youre just trying to survive someone you cant see the rest of it. My mom had a deep moral sense of passionate commitment to justice. She did fair housing work in the 1960s after she divorced my father. She became the accountant for a battered womens shelter for years and theres just a sense that its not somebody elses job to stand up was one of her core values. She was born in brooklyn, raised in queens and also have the kind of new yorker willingness to get in your face and stuff and theres much more complex things. She loved trees and flowers and books and novels and thomas hardy and things like that and i inherited a lot of anxiety and selfdoubt from her. But just i think there are an ethical core in my brothers as well that its not someone elses job to do something about it that has been really great. My paternal grandmother who was supposed to be this schizophrenic, i found some cards from her recently and this is heartbreaking. I realized she was a loving person and i didnt know how to recognize it and we would have both benefited so much and i even known what love looked like and how to accept affection but i was so walled up to survive d that i didnt so i feel like she died when i was 20, my grandmother stayed in queens the rest of her life so i didnt know her growing up. She was a rosie the river, the daughter of an irish immigrant who died giving birth to her. And so there with me in variousways. But you know, i think that moral core is the most important thing and it didnt come from my mothers background. From that in some ways from irish people before they were just more white people, there was a radical lineage in her family as outsiders, as antibritish Irish Republicans and anticolonialists so thank you for a great question and now i cant wait to find out what the people behind you are going to ask i thought thyou were leaving, thank you for coming up to ask. Does somebody want to tellthe mic down for them . Me and my friend avery were wondering what advice do you have for young feminists and activists who want to change the world . I think theres a wonderful thing my friend Bill Mckinnon whos been a great climate activistfor 30 years and you didnt ask this question but a lot of people say what can i do as an individual . He says not being an individual needing join something, find your people and it can be a wonderful thing but kids whove been doing fridays for future, it looks like you might have been doing that, haveyou done that . I love youto death. Theyve been such wonderful amazing people and feminism i think often means just looking really hard at whats going on from a gender perspective and finding people who can often as women we are told that didnt happen, that didnt matter. We are going to trustanyones verdict before you. Nine people who back you up. Ffind people who value you. Find people who believe in you and believe you when you Say Something happened and those are the people you want to be with and those are the people who are feminists so i hope you find both of those tpeople and you are the kind of people i think about when i do this work because you are the future and i wanted to be as beautiful as generous as inclusive, as open, as Carbon Neutral as possible. Dont laugh at Carbon Neutral, its serious. We need to leave it in the ground and we can. One of the great revolutions of the 21st century is going from where we were with solar and nuclear in 2000 when they were completely inadequate to power all of our Energy Systems to where we are now thanks to secret revolutions of engineering and technology can leave it all behind and make the transition and picking up hopeful things, one of the things thats nice about being really old and 58 3 4 is really old is having long lived long enough to see the arc of change. A 17yearold said last week im so crushed by warrens defeat, is it ever going to change and i was able to say when i think of how terrible theworld was to women when i was born , i know it has changedso much. I know people are here who are going to change it and i know people who are going to be here after are going to keep changing it because unraveling 5000 years of a tree artie is a big project but weve done so much in 50 years and the Climate Movement which was almost nothing in 2000 is so hipowerful and effective and creative and inspired right now. Challenged in many ways to, we need to scale it up but i believe we can win and i think everyone, i thank everyone who is trying. [applause] here are some of the current bestselling Nonfiction Books according to newsmax. Topping the list is abc News White House correspondent Jonathan Karls recounting of his coverage of the Trump Administration in the trump show. Then in the house of kennedy, bestselling author James Patterson and journalist Cynthia Fagan car the recall the political lives of the kennedy family. After thats pulitzer prizewinning investigative journalist eric ayers look at the opioid and then through the experiences of those in permit West Virginia in depth in monthly. Thats followed by the some of the people, Data Scientist andrew whitbys history of census taking and wrapping up our look at the bestselling Nonfiction Book is the sword and shield, historian neil josephs examination of the relationship between malcom x and Martin Luther king jr. And how they defined the civil rights movement. Some of these authors have appeared on tv and you can watch them online at recollections of my nonexistence. Booktv. Org. Next up conversation between Doris Kearns Goodwin and bud selig on his career and what baseball can do to remain relevant and history professor serena is even provides a history of the 1770 boston massacre. Later alexis co. , host of the podcast president s are people to chronicle the life of george washington. Find more information on your program or online at booktv. Org. Please welcome Doris Kearns Goodwin and budselig. Hello everybody. Well, everybody sit down. I am so happy to be here with my friend the commissioner,