Transcripts For CSPAN2 Rebecca Solnit Recollections Of My Nonexistence 20240713

[applause] now our guest rebecca is the author of more than 20 books including a field guide to getting lost, the faraway nearby, paradise built in hell, river shadows and wonder love, a history of walking, she is also the author of men explain things to me on feminism activism and social change, hope and also the crime it crisis. A product is a California Public Education System from can get into graduate school, shes a regular contributor to the guardian. Leslie jamison is the author of the New York Times bestseller recovery and empathy stands inis the novel. Shes a good tubing writer for New York Times magazine and her work has appeared in publications including in the quarterly review. She directs the graduate Nonfiction Program at columbiaa university. Please help me welcome rebecca and leslie jamison. [applause] before i started im not doing the book signings because its a more Perfect Technology for what people to handle objects and for all the people to handle all the objects and its neverpe been invented and were in a global pandemic, i also want to say i am canceling most of the tour for the next couple of weeks because its the responsible thing to do and i want you want to wash your hands into Hand Sanitizer in between washing your hands and not touch d ything and dont sneeze or cough on anybody, just be really careful, those of us were healthy and robust and have options have an obligation to exercise the loving care for those who are more fragile and for the social body. I decided last week i was not going to sign books and assigning line because of germs in the pandemic is clearly what is that rumbling is the sign or subway, is that like the ultimate new york question. [laughter] so i was not worried about my health but i did not want to be running around the country being a vector in a did not want to be in large gatherings as theyre being banned so that the pendant conversation which means it intersects with the lack of a term recollection with my conversation but i wanted to make that psa and now i will read a little bit and sit down with leslie to whom im so grateful for coming up with such fantastic questions for conversation. This is a little bit of the beginning of the book. One day long ago i looked at myself as i faced a full link the mere and saw my image darken and soften andi seemed to retrt as though i was vanishing from the world rather than my mind was shutting and out. I studied myself on the doorframe just across the hall from the mere and in my legs crumpled underneath me, my own image drifted away from the interdarkness as i was only a ghost even for my own site, i blacked out occasionally and had disease spells often in those days, this time was memorable because it appeared there was not a world vanishing from my consciousness but that i was vanishing from theatg world, is the person who is vanishing and the disembodied person watching her from a distance both and neither in those days i was trying to disappear and to appear in trying to be safe and someone in those agendas were often at odds with each other, as i was watching myself to see if i could read in the mere what i could be and whether i was good enough and whether all the things ive been told about myself were true to be a young woman interface your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee or the knowledge of it are all those things at once. A beautiful woman is unquestionably the most potable the world said Edgar Allan Poe who must not have imagined from a perspective of women who prefer to live, i was trying to not be the subject of someone n elses poetry good not to get killed, i was trying to find the poetic for my own with no maps, no guides, not much to go on, they mightve been out there but i have not located in yet. The struggle to find a poetry in which 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 that relishes your failures is work that many and perhaps most young women have to do. In the early years i did not do particularly well or clearly but i did it ferociously,. [applause] thank you for being here rebecca it is wonderful to have the chance to talk to you in it to give to all of us. It is wonderful to hear the beginning of the book and hearing your voice. I was wondering, were in aer strange time and there is a lot i want to ask about the book on its own but i guess in the past couple of days leading up to this event i have been thinking about the ways in which some of the ideas in this book, particular ideas about how Community Functions andh how at rises out of community and identity rises out of community, they feel like they speak to the moment in particular ways but i was curious, i thought maybe we could start with how you been thinking about the present moment we are in, thinking about contagion and health in the ways that we might care for each other, how some of those very urgent realities the moment are spoken in the book or speak to the book or how rather their connections and feel present for you. The tragedy of epidemic, and ordinary disaster earthquake, hurricane, et cetera if the authority and racism dont muck it up too much, people come together in an amazing and beautiful ways as they did for example in Hurricane Sandy and 9 11 much more so than anybody really reflected at the time as we left the bush administration. I think we can say hijacked the meaning of that event and the idea that we all have to be separate to be safe is such a complicatedsa one, it gets so close to xenophobia and as we sit here in the synagogue, weird ideas about purity and im excited to be in a a synagogue n a synagogue playing the min is ago and whats interesting to me, we have to be separate to be together and be in separate is how we take care ofe each othe, were going toar separate ourselves in various waves out of solidarity and how do we communicate that, it is interesting, its almost them purposes of what happened to me as a young woman, i realized that a certain point, why was i not political when i was young and realizing toat be political you have to feel like you have something in common with other people and that you have power, i started out with neither of those things and obviously ended up with plenty of both but itin was a journey so i feel like also every crisis is partly a storytelling crisis, how do we tell the story that we are doing this, not because we are shunning them, how do we tell the story that we are separating physically because werepa coming together and its virtually a Civil Society and how do we do it when the institution that shouldve laid the groundwork to do this right have failed as a Trump Administration has economically in terms of managing the cdc, the information and the rest. Theres a lot to say from what you just said but i do think there is something that is subtle and vital about the role the narrative can play in framing as a form of care rather than a form of fear mongering or scapegoating or distancing or even just talking about in that way and that separateness is away were trained to care for each other than protect ourselves an attorney important thinking about care rather than protection or Something Like that. It is also going to be interesting because we are such a profound unequal society, some have great healthcare coverage and some have none, some people can telecommute from home and the whitecollar jobs and some are workers who will lose their apartment if they dont show up and work even if they are worried, even if theyif are sic, there has been a bunch of people, this is not my original point noting that a better case for all, paid sick leave, a bunch of other stuff cannot be made by this pandemic which i think also makes a great case for Elizabeth Warren sadly. [applause]e] my people. [laughter] saying really smart things about the pandemic and the economic crisis last month and saw it coming then of course Elizabeth Warren can be a beautiful segue to the fear and silencing of women in american society. Im going to pick up on something that you said a few minutes ago about how when you were a young woman thinking about what meant to be political to you then that you neither felt that you had power nor were you deeply in touch with thehe feeling of having things inn common with others and us connecting that, the portion of what you read when you talk about one of the really core ideas in the book to be a young woman to face the prospect of your own annihilation in both of thosehi maybe think of one of te really compelling origin stories in the book that would be a great point of departure which is the story of your writing desk, the concrete literal coming from and you tell the story that im hoping you might share with us, receiving the desk as a gift from a friend who had experienced trauma and i wonder if everything i had ever written as a counterweight to that attempt to reduce the young woman to nothing and so i wonder if you could tell us the story and how inflected the writing that happened on it. The book has a pretty mild start after the opening passage, its a sunday after Ronald Reagan inauguration, the moment when the economy was going to turn away from the new deal in the Great Society and the social safety net and become the monster that now destroy so many lives in this country, i was househunting, my parents cut me off a few years before i was 19 and i was really poor, i was looking in the want ads in San Francisco and there was a 200 a month apartment and i called the number in the building manager told me too come look at it and i made an appointment and so i started with the story that is a really positive story about a complete stranger in a old black man who saw how much i wanted and needed this apartment and a place of my own and went out on a limb to make it possible for me too have it in a talk about the apartment in the neighborhood and the spiritual neighborhood and you know objects in the house which become to the opening of the third chapter which is something completely different, it begins with furniture, this is the chapter about my experience as a young woman constantly harassed on the street and elsewhere in a society that would not acknowledge the existence of the violence except by telling me that i just had to accept as a given and adapt myself to the fact that lets of men want to kill and harm and torture integrate and intimidate and insult woman all the time and we are not going to do a damn thing about it, you just have to go there, not do this and not be out and not talk to these people not wear that dress the in this litany of things that women are not supposed to do because of men that we end up having in our lives so much. The chapter begins from a segway of the stuff about my apartment of my writing desk and describing it, it was giving after i moved into the apartment by a friend of mine i known for a few years who had left her boyfriend the year before and to punish her for daring to leave him endearing to choose what she needed rather than what he wanted, he stabbed her 15 times and left her to bleed to death. And because somebody came along because there was an ambulance and transfusions in the hospital, she did not die, although the police blamed her in the school she was blamed her and everyone blamed her fors wt happened and there was no justice. So she moved far away back to San Francisco, gave me the desks that have been given to her by a woman who was evicted and this is an really interesting thingin about writing that it makes me look harder, go deeper and everything i ever written, arrange chairs, i write on airplanes, i write in bed, you know i write everywhere but mostly i written at that desk since i was 19, i was only writing this book, everything i okever written has been writtenn a platform given to me by a woman a man tried to silence forever and therefore i think everything ivefo ever written which was pretty early on about feminism in my punk magazine story covering 1985 andt wonder last and so many things85 since then has been a counter to that attempt to make women nobody and nothing and dedan silent and powerless and it was kind of shocking and now i know i cannot get a bigger desk either. For a while. And you been riding on a really big desk the whole time, thats a great way to think about it. The desk has been bigger than you. His legs go all the way down to the bottom of the story. They go all the way down. I was thinking about how in writing and has a counterweight to that attempt to silence a woman and how you make choices around what the writing involves and i think certainly for me as an admirer as your work in somebody whos been really influenced by your work and im sure i speak for many people in this room when i talk about the admiration, one thing that i love the most is the way that your work to totally erase this distinction between what it means to talk about the personal and political and that the counterweight you are describing very much involved invoking both in trying to document the constant conversation between the personal and the political but i was really struck by a moment in this book when you describe coming out of the background of an underground that was more focused on journalism and shifting or pivoting away from the more objective language of reportage or the motive of the oped first trying toto find a more personal language that can get specific about various kinds of harm that society was inflicting particulate on women in all sorts of ways, i wonder if you could talk about what the evolution was like away from the objective editorial journalistic mode, not that you abandoned the message by claiming the role that a person complaint and narrative and the political import. How that evolved and how you think about the question of invokingab the personal. I was influenced by the postmodern assertion that theres no such thing as a neutral position that everyone is invested every position is political and all of us speak from a particular place that has to do with who we are in values and consequences because before that there was such a sense theres something neutral and usually pretending to some weird rationality but what i was really doing back then in the 80s was ridingg in three different types, was trained as a journalist at berkeley which was a great training so doing journalistic work, i was riding and working as an art critic where you assume authoritative tone but that is clearly personal in your opinion but very externalized and that these are my opinions and associations but this is my most historic, i was writing much more personal essays and i felt like three things that were really a far apart and then with actually be an activist that changed everything, we so often talk about activism being a brockley that you should be with implications that its mildly unpleasant and so love virtue signaling but a lot of the things. [laughter] a lot of the best things that happened to me came to me in the best people that ever happened to me were because of activism so in 1988 i started going to the annual spring action in the Nevada Test Site were more than 1000 new car bombs have been detonated. Experiences that became part of it comes up later and it was such an externally experience you hadpe mormon down winters, atomic veterans, nuclear physicists, japanese survivors of the atomic bombs in japanese buddhist monks, the wonderful franciscan priest and nuns who were radicals, kinda like a lesbian pagans because it was still the 80s. [laughter] and anarchist and more anarchist, guys who tried to hug you and we were dealing with the rehearsals for the end of the world in the dusty remote place, very few people had ever seen was where the cold war was being enacted and it was also a shoshone land and became as the land right struggle which was one of the most transformative and eyeopening and wonderful thing 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 meaning western attitudes and civil disobedience through gandhi and the antinuclear activism, all the other layers that i realized i needed every tool that i had and that meant the journalism, the critical analysis because you can actually take the tools it you make for criticism and apply them to the politics of the nonrepresentation in the representation of Nuclear Weapon and were in the coded masculinity and anthropologist was decoding in among nuclear physicists, you can use all those tools but also the personal experience, what waspht like standing in handcuffs watching the most beautiful sunset in the world and i cattle pin with 500 people who care about the same things that you do, i realized i bought into the idea that these were three different types of writing but they can all be one type of writing in the personal was experiential what was it like to be at this place in camp next to a nuclear creator and what was it like to be handcuffed and driven 70 miles in the ritual, what is it like to unlearn the versions of western history that are race native americans, what is it like to join the indian wars in the 1990s manifestation, thatik was actually my one big litter larry breakthrough, they all belong together, that produced my second book savage dreams so yeah in a way your answer to the question and ask the very thing youre describing by invoking those particular examples of being handcuffed in the cattle pen and watching the beautiful sunset with 500 people who care about the same things that you do. It gives me chills in a way that feels quite related to what youre describing as a personal experience that you can bring your ideas to life with a particular abstract. There is a beautiful passage in the book where you describe trying to write an essay along essay about so much of the book is people are getting is about you coming of age of the writer and not becoming of age one but becoming over and over again, you talk about adulthood of process of evolution rather than the single threshold, you describe trying to work on the essay of walking alone at night you are looking for a way of the poetics of what you wanted with the politics of whatnt obstructd you from having it or reaching and i was so struck by that desire to wed the poetics of desire with the politics off obstruction and it made me think about the role of poetics in your work in particular the role of beauty in your work and was curious to hear you speak to admit moves through this book, what role you think the beauty has, the production of beauty and beautiful language in the articulation of outrage or the articulation injustice, what can beauty do, what will this beauty play in thator project. One of my great influences who saved us from the hideous cliches of marxism warmed over multicasserole in the back of the refrigerator, it gave us the poetic language that was grounded as rural people are in metaphor and flowers and animals, and ideas of time and whether in season and light and darkness, i wanted to write beautifully but not as a decorative thing and theres often a sense that politics is kind of ugly and impersonal and very separate from beauty but something thats been very important to me that you can call moral beauty and im reading the crying book by christie i forget her last name but everybody else here knows. Yes Heather Christie and somebody asked me what was the last book that made you cry and i hardly ever cry over sad things but something that is so noble, so generous, so hopeful can really make me tear up and it is interesting, i feel like there is an emotional beauty and generosity and heroism and all these things that are really cool bite and cynical people and its one of the things imy really interested in and a kind of moral beauty of living your life thats a beautiful way to live versus being a really horrible person who owns a lot of beautiful things which i think is the model of beauty that we can this country like owner sweatshop and exploit your workers that you could own a really beautiful yacht and all the ugliness and that is so invisible and be a really awesome preschool teacher your whole life is beautiful and even if your apartment is small. I think what was that. [laughter] okay, i salute you. My sisterinlaw is an amazing middle school teacher, my aunt was a kindergarten teacher, i have so much respect for teachers. But there is a set of beauty and it is interesting because it is often seen as superficial, it can be more complicated, i think youre interested in the photographer who at the time was photographing military violence subscribed on the landscape that really accept people so i wanted beautiful things and good things to be the same thing and they are necessarily the often displays the power that are very impressive and so he was really kind of twisting a knife in the social wound of the conflict between power and violence and the good ways. I learned so much from him. Being an art critic as a young woman meant i got to work with these amazing artists that taught me so much. But i think you cannot beautiful things, there is a leftwing, im just chewing this over because it comes at me from all directions, there is a leftwing idea that we should not have anything nice until after the revolution when everyone has something nice and it is like there will always be suffering and nice things incompatible with being passionately committed to the liberation of all beings and universal human rights. And you know not necessarily the yacht that i wanted a preschool teacher to have nice dresses and some really good dishes from an amazing rummage sale like me. [laughter] i was thinking when you were describing that hypothetical preschool teacher. A Beautiful Life and very small apartment maybe it isnt so small that in the multitudes. There is way in which pursuing an ethics in one life or writing isnt necessarily incompatible with beauty or pleasure the stark divide. One of the things i loved experientially about reading this book is your attention to various kinds of pleasure that its not, theres nothing pathetic about this book youre attentive to the pleasures of friendship. You are attentive to the pleasures of urban living and the kinds of devotion he felt around you. You are attentive, theres a beautiful scene he described being part of a piece of Performance Art and sitting with you are, you can tell the full story but sitting with your hand in a jar of honey for hours, which is another beautiful instance of pleasure the book at its core is about something really tough and often grim the ambient violence that surrounds women everywhere all the time. I think of it in some ways is an antimemoir, memoirs so often we all want to tell our story this way the thing that happened to you happen to you personally which means you personally can overcome it. We know that this is also a story we are told economically if you are poor, if you cant pay the mortgage, if youre in debt its your own damned fault rather than that the system is stacked against you. As a young woman i was just told i needed to learn to cope with the fact that lots of men want to harm and kill people like me but it was this really grim things so i thought i wanted to o convey the story of making a particular voice my writers voice and in the context of a society that didnt want women any of us to have a voice and then it sort of like, what gets you through that . Books i spend a lot of time enalone reading and then readin and writing and then i was also so friendless at that point the book begins. I didnt even know how to connect to people somehow i ended up having some really good friends who became part of the story and the conversations, the collaborations, the ways we supported each other. The way we made work that influenced each other. Its also kind of like what got me through that but its about those two things all the things that tried to silence women and how sensual voice and voice looseness are on an equal voice to the problem of violence in a society where women were as audible and credible had equal access to the law, to the courts, etc. And to all other forms of power this violence would be almost impossible. Its not really about physical strength. Harvey weinstein mightve been stronger than some of those women. It was the fact that he was stronger in controlling the narratives than they were that let him get away with it for 40 years. Something changed in the narrative which i believe hes been sentenced tomorrow im sure he never imagined this day would come. I wanted to, i wanted to be visceral and personal and thats where the beautiful stuff entered and but in the context of something horrifically ugly another pandemic that we havent dealt with enough the way i know many people have done wonderful things from feminism commit invented battered womens shelters which i hope someday we live in a world that so nonviolently of houses where women and how children hit ferment and had to disappear because that violence, just seem like some kind of bizarre thing from a wooded society but i wanted to convey the particulars of my life and the generalities of the world we all live in a world so intent on destroying women in so many ways. And so little discussed and thats part of the silence i wanted to break that silence. I meandered there. You did beautifully. On the other hand, meandering is a all ive ever done. [laughter] it makes me feel at home. I have a friend who told me i always speak in paragraphs rather than sentences. The way you answer this question feels like a beautiful micro version of reading your prose. You have the strands within they are all necessary and they converge in these beautiful and surprising ways. Something you were saying about your book, thinking of your book is an rantimemoir in a particular way of pushing back against the idea that ones own story somehow exists in isolation or is only personal. And also the idea that you personally are responsible for resolving the problem and you can leave 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 about a rape a minute in this culture. There is a beating every, one source says nine seconds, 12 seconds, you do not actually leave it behind. There is also a way people are like, it didnt happen to you. Violence against women didnt suddenly end and theres no guarantee it wont happen to me but also know women is an island. Im so impacted by the fact that i read about violence in the news every day. Im so impacted by what happened to my friend the fact that my mother was a battered woman ablittle girls my nieces and great nieces and friends kids and worry about what can happen to them. Seeing my friends daughter start to get targeted at 12 and 13 and 14. We also tell the story either it happens to you personally, hdirectly, either you been a victim of violence or you have not. We understand we really understand around racism and the rest the fact that it could happen to you impacts you but i dont think we understand it enough around gender violence at optically understand enough around racism either. I remember being so struck hearing how the chronic stress of racism can cause diabetes and hypertension which are huge Health Things and in this country. There is the huge, what is it do to you . I wanted to open a conversation i feel like we never had i 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. Im starting to hear those stories from women and a woman told me about how her university thought she wasnt empathic enough to her stalker and wanted to hear his needs. I heard from a woman who mentally prepared herself how to go numb when she was raped. Its the thing we were always say you werent rape so everything is fine. Its like, no, spending formative years imagining people doing horrific things to you, it has an impact. What is it due to our psyche . Im not the victim of any single extreme act of violence as an adult but i am a person who was so targeted by harassment and the menace and threats and all the rest, it seemed so likely to me for a number of years that all these worst things would happen to me that i really was a person with what we now understand as ptsd, eagerly diagnosed among men coming home from work, rarely diagnosed and even discussed a feeling that actually much more commonly impact survivors of rape. David morris, who is an iraq war vet and wrote a beautiful book about ptsd which he has from an ied in iraq. He wrote me when i wrote to him discussed this about actually how rape survivors have a much higher incidence than men in war and what does that say about our society that we havent even gotten there to talk about yet. I wrote this book vbecause my experiences are so ordinary and because all of us are impacted by this. Whatever our gender, whatever our role in this and because we still need to talk about it either. We need to go deeper we need to understand its not a bad thing happens to you or doesnt happen to you, its we are real all impacted by living in a world in which these things happen to so many people in which most of us are in a category because we are clear, nonwhite, divergent in some way, not male, because were not adults, because were not powerful in which these things can happen to us. The psychic toll is immense. Its almost impossible, it such a stretch to imagine a society in which everyone feels free and confident and safe and valued but we can take it as a northstar to direct all our political movements. You have really aba really powerful way of articulating this truth you been describing that its not a question of this stark blackandwhite binary of are you a victim of violence are not where at one point in the book you talk about how we can frame it as like you are moving through the world and maybe you fall into the water of trauma but instead of thinking about it as either you fall in the water or you dont fall in the water maybe we should recognize that we are all swimming in the water. The framing is awesome as part of this personal is him a bad thing happened to you and its like you fell in the water and then the rest of your story is going to be about how you climbed out of the water and maybe its an overcoming story somebody memoirs are. Its like what if the water what if there is no dry land . What i really felt its not my job to adapt to violence against women, its unacceptable and im never going to adapt to it by accepting it. And im never going to escape it. Ive been doing this, any of you who follow me in basement have been doing this thing for a while where a screenshot the front of the Guardian Newspaper online and you know those things when youre like signing on something worse like prove youre not a robot how many of the squares of crosswalks or windmills and what will prove youre not a robot, home movies stories about violence against women . It will be a story with epstein a story with julian assange, story would trump a story with weinstein but there also be the mexican woman protest yesterday that was so amazing. There will be this thing like saying 5 7 of the top stories are actually about violence against women but we are not treating it as an epidemic. Its not my job to adapt, to accept something unacceptable and its not something i can overcome alone and antiwar more in this memoir is that the only adequate solution is profound social change. Thats what feminine is here for aband why am here for feminism. If you like the triumph in this book isnt that i got a voice and became a writer, although thats really nice and thats why im up here, the triumph in this book is that around 2012 the sort of slowgrowing subterranean force of feminism became so powerful it finally open up a space to have those conversations nobody would have with me when i was young and facing constant harassment. We started to have this amazing transformative conversation thats resulted in new york and california active positive consent laws me too is often treated as suddenly out of nowhere this amazing thing happened in october 2017 its like, no commits part of this particular wave of feminism started in 2012, which is a result of 50 years of feminism laying the groundwork by having women judges and University President s and feminist men as well deciding the stories in newspapers and tvs. People being willing to listen to women in no ways they never have before. To recognize the gravity of what the stories they were telling us about violence. That 50 years comes out of 150 years of feminism on this continent. You can go all the way back to one of my favorite human beings ever commit mary wall stonecroft looking at the rights of man and the french revolution and writing a book about the rights of women in the 1790s that as a starting point. So it didnt start in 2017. [laughter] like the legs of the writing desk go all the way down. Looking around to see if i guess catholic churches do the tree of jesse which is christ ancestors represented as a tree but im always looking for like how did we get here . Where did this start . Genealogy is not of pedigree but of like helpless suffragists in london influenced gandhi who went out and invented mass civil disobedience after reading our local guys a row in which became an influence on Martin Luther king and how that went to the arab spring with helped launched occupy this very city which became a force that opened up a conversation which is why the Democratic Party is forced to be. I like those narratives. And it feels conceptually connected to me with how youre describing into memoir. They both ways of thinking about things relationally. Historical events have deeper roots and often we see at first glance. Im going to open it up in a minute or two because i know that there are so many questions from you guys in the audience but im going to ask one or two more i wrote a book about your book, i had so many questions about it. I could keep you here all night but i know that there are going to be some thoughtful questions from everybody else. I will ask one more and before i turn it over. Its kind of going back to some of the ways among other things this book is, its a document of being young and not knowing everything that lies ahead. Which we know one of the conditions of these. You describe at one point losing a job as a waitress and an Italian Restaurant because a amaybe there were a few reasons but one of them was you are struggling with uncorking the wine bottles you say that you were grateful to be not that great at opening wine bottles because it led to everything that followed in particular is wonderful job at ss moma which led to your first book but i love that particular narrative of a failure or obstruction that led to all these things you couldnt see coming. I was curious to hear you speak to either in the book or outside of it other failures or disappointments that you feel grateful for looking back or rejections. The difficult things in the moment that ended up building something. The first one is im not good at very many things. And bad at sports. Im still kind of a socially awkward person a lot of the time. I think that narrowed down. I met people who are charming and multitalented abkind of dabbling a little bit. I was sort of good at one thing growing up, i was incredibly lucky because there was also the thing i almost wanted to do which was to write because i was so bad it Everything Else it was like the channel narrowed i wasnt abroad meandering prairie river. You see people who are good at things and get seduced by them like it was a good restaurant i wouldve made good tips. Im glad i got out of the Service Industry young because i got a museum job with research that taught me a whole lot about modern art which led to an job at an Art Newspaper where i learned more. I think there are things we are good at that are dangerous. Just like ive seen people who are really charming who got caught up its like i could so manipulate whatever people want what they dont know they forgotten what they want. For example. Theres a whole history somebody could write a fortunate failures wordsworth very intentionally Cambridge University where he was supposed to become take divinity orders abhe kind of played hooky and wants to cross france in 1790 when it was at the height of the french revolution this incredible walking tour i write about at erlength in one or less. The way he failed to Everything Else he could be the poet he is meant to be. Tits an interesting thing. I think its really hard often, some of it was accidental also. I left my last job in 1988 and i thought it was temporary and i was going to get another one and i kind of didnt, havent gotten around to it yet. [laughter] i also think i had really modest ambitions. I wanted to be a writer i wrote a lot of 500 word things and felt like writing thousand word things is really ambitious a 5000 word things was really ambitious. But i got my first book contract in 1988 onand i was terrified and i set myself up by saying, okay, chapter is like an essay, i know how to write an essay in aythis might not be true for fiction but its true for nonfiction. It actually bugs me i write books i think are very much following it together but seen as essay collections like the field guide to getting lost. I was like, okay, i know how to write essays. Because nobody had big ambitions for me i was like also ive seen a lot of young white men who are going to write the Great American novel which is going to be so great they cant do anything less than the Great American novel like learn how to write by writing short stories and modest things and maybe doing journalism or reviewing. I was just going to write a little bit more and a little bit more so there wasnt failure exactly but there was a kind of incrementalism which in politics often gets a bad word but its how things happen. It was how i kind of let myself along to the next thing and the next thing. The first book was fairly straightforward historical narrative and then the nevada test taught me how i was really going to write in the second book was much more rated narrative shifting in tone and focus from more objective history to more firstperson experience to leave it altogether. I was off and running. And how youre describing, it struck me that when you are describing that sort of the incremental work in various forms, journalism and feminism, that all of that led to that breakthrough. I think also something to say about the genealogy im also saying about antimemoir that ties back to our pandemic is im interested in how things are connected and part of my antimemoir in my last book was viking the faraway by was a different kind of antimemoir. I wanted to say we are made out of stories stories that esliberate us and stories that break down of the stories that rise up in a moment of crisis. That abrings us to like storie about people we will never meet that might need our lifejackets negative side of the shipwreck. In the same way we are connected to these lineages. This book is about what happened to me happens just so many women. In the nonseparation there and that the change that has to happen is a change we do together. And about coming to feel connected, which was coming to feel that this could be changed. The epidemic is also how we need to do this thing together. Nobodys going to stop this epidemic but if everybody does what were supposed to do i feel like i should nag you about handwashing and not touching things, dont touch her face. Noright now, dont touch your face. Dont expose fragile people to unnecessary risks. You guys all know that stuff. But we are all in this together. The epidemic will be overcome by everybody doing the right thing. E whats also so interesting about it is, if we do it we need to do a lot of people will be like, that was a lot of fuss about nothing because we wont have mass deaths and hospitals overwhelmed victory so often looks like nothing. The decline in the violence, the decline in this catastrophe or the specific things, the force that wasnt cut down. The prisoners who werent executed. If everybody does the right thing in your country we wont be italy and this will be the pandemic that did it become catastrophic. But will be because of a million tiny decisions every one of us is making. As you were saying earlier about the importance of narrative, it then becomes so important for the narrative to reflect that to reflect just not an absence or unnecessary effort but actually a triumph of all those incremental decisions you are describing. I loved what you said earlier about the our boundaries are not abperhaps our boundaries are no longer stage and wonder if we could open it up. Maybe we are passing theres a microphone. Stay about six inches back away from the microphone and then you dont have to handle it. [laughter] and i have hand spray. Straight rubbing alcohol with geranium oil. I highly recommend it. Thank you so much. I come from a zealously ab family whose matriarch is named patricia and her daughter is also named patricia as is her daughters daughter. I would ask for your advice on how to navigate that. I strongly feel that your books possess all the wisdom and energy i need. My question is. [crying] whether you might be able to believe me in this moment and believe that i need all of the wisdom and aeu donta wrap a bow around it and send it to the white house. I was actually thinking about the people whose boundaries are so tight. You can see as chumps talk about the epidemic, you who wrote about empathy exams is complete inability to recognize anybody else but him is real and anything other than profit matters. And that failure. I touched it. Speaking of patriarchy and feminism with the f. [inaudible] im wondering how we can kind of coalesce multiple people of multiple gender identities under the umbrella of feminism lewhich i think when done correctly there some way its not done well at all but like capital white feminists but how do we use your structures of thinking to include more people in the joint fight we need to do together. Feminism and queer rights have been so united that the root of so much of the evil. I always say because i worked on native american rights ive worked on exposing racial crimes in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in new orleans. I wanted to write an essay for years and years called thank you gay men because i grew up in what was and enough it still is, thank you gentrification, the clearest city in america and im so proud of that. I was so proud of the San Francisco that was. I grew up there to. Really . So you know. And the dykes on bikes and everybody else. What these queer people were modeling for me we dont have to accept our gender ceassignment, its totally wort it to break the gnrules there will be punishment but its still worth it. Something we dont talk about enough gay men want Gay Liberation and women want women liberation and black people want antiracism but we liberate each other through example. I feel old school is around feminism and magenta vocabulary and just being worked on at this very moment. Will always be a work in progress because new terms and frames wonderful once keep emerging. Part of what feminism has always been is that there are no limits to what it means to be a woman and therefore your genitals are not your destiny your dna is not your destiny your parents intentions are not your destiny. They dont determine your destiny, your love life, we all belong anywhere we want to be. Something that was actually really exciting for me i got to write about several years ago was realizing in a way that samesex marriage became possible because feminists transform marriage. I was thinking about like, what exactly is this defense of marriage bs about. It was really common to say when it was still in question legally like jack and bob getting married doesnt really impair mary and steve getting married but it actually does if they want to have the defense of traditional marriage the idea marriage is a hierarchical ownership relationship in which the man is dominant and the woman is subordinate. Feminists dismantle that in some way in many ways saying it should be between equals which i think made the idea of equal marriage more possible. A lot of the key feminists of the 70s on Adrienne Rich and her lover, etc. , were lesbians and not doing conventional marriage. Its also interesting how these feedback loops happen. That marriage makes as more and more people think marriage is a abeven for straight people to imagine every consenting adults can marry the person they love. Stuff like that really interests me. I think the dialogue could be smarter, more conscious, more open. Are there some ways you want to see it specifically . Ive been wondering about it for a long time i read your books and really strongly adhering to the mentality from it but i know it can be really fancy exclusive. I think its interesting how much the last five or 10 years have opened up the question of how we are going to think about ilgender and biological sex and the complex ways in which they are tethered to each other and just paying attention to trans rights and trans issues and making space for them like everyone who knows me on social media knows that im the thirdbiggest Elizabeth Warren stand in the world but i started saying a sentence the other day as she started to say more about trance. I was going to say that everyone elses ever run for president put together it was so interesting seeing how different the conversation had become this is my hope in the dark hat on what i often say is its great that we begun to address this problem believe me, it does not mean i think we got to the finish line and we can all let go home. Its on the table in a different way and i think thats really exciting. I feel extraordinarily blessed to have grown up around queer women and queer men i was one neighborhood from the castro and the kindest person to me in my formative in my teens from like 13 to 18 was a gay man and benefited so greatly from it just like a benefited from being parts of a native american part of how i want to change the story is this idea how we are connected and benefit from each others benefit from each others experience from each others thinking that its not just like morally we shouldnt just care about people exactly like ourselves but imaginatively we have so much to gain from these other points of view, perspectives come identities. Thank you for letting me ramble around and all that. Thank you for the answer. Guess related to that you have such a beautiful way of shining the spotlight on other movements and writers and i noticed in the introduction you read from that you quoted Britt Marling which seemed to be such an appropriate Kindred Spirit shot out. This is a bit of a surface level question frankly but you were to people if i could have dinner with any three people you two would be serious candidates. [laughter] im curious from your end who would you want at your table a handful of people you would find incredibly empathetic and brilliant at this moment . Mi8 limited to current humans. You make the rules rebecca solnit. [laughter] [applause] this book tour getting counseling breaks my heart im so glad i got leslie. I had absome of the tour may continue britt and i are supposed to do an event in San Francisco may 11 and it will be podcast. Its funny people ive had private conversations with. We got a number of long walks mostly talking about feminism but everything that relates to feminism. Thank you for bringing her up. Then if i have a uk tour im going to talk with mary beard and i cannot tell you how excited i am. Im slightly terrified that suddenly the conversation will switch to latin and will be out of my depth but i think shes a lovely person and shes just been so bad ass writing about feminism. I really feel like we are in a golden age for both feminist thinking and writing and we dont need to look at any other era and envy them because the writers and thinkers and activists alive and active right now the woman who started black lives matter, some of the indigenous activists around climate so many of the people i know from occupy wall street like in some ways this is the worst time to live which is why im a climate activist but its also a golden age for formulating new tools and perspectives and ideas and i feel really lucky with the company i keep just in what i read and hear as well as who i know personally. Thank you for letting me go into that. Had a question about remorse. I think you mentioned the golden age we seem to be in now with people twriting and discussing i feel personally empowered by words to things ive only felt before or empathy from things i never said out loud and discovering that loads of people think the same thing. What i wondered one of the feelings id be interested to hear about is remorse i didnt know then what i know now. Or the feeling that that time has been lost or that could have been a different behavior. I wondered how you dealt with that if you felt it at all and if theres anything can take from it moving forward. I think part of middle age for me has been kind of acceptance that we progress through mistakes and we have to make those mistakes to learn to change something. I say in the beginning of the book i dont envy people anymore who had pamazing aweso families i feel like if i had one great stroke of luck its a kind of instability thats allowed me to continue to evolve and change and say, wait, thats not who i want to become a thats not how i want to be treated. I still make mistakes and i wish that i set up for myself stronger here or there but basic ideas we should be kind to each other which is like one of the things i learned from buddhism is the big things we need to learn a really stupid obvious things we know but until they are inscribed in our bones were not living abit took me into my 30s to be like him actually, i dont want, leaving aside Major Political figures that a great distance. I dont want to muck people. I dont want to be cruel to people i dont want to be around people who do that. Just kindness as a criteria for mine and others behavior. I think it enters into this book was a big concept as was the concept that maybe i should be treated well. There are so many things like that you just have to its easy to tell the stories of how it couldve been better like you couldve skipped this phase you couldve done this right away etc. But it always feels like a process in which you had to be there so you could be that you had to do this and you had to fill it that so you could do this that it isnt this is a culture that loves shortcuts and the mention im a meander, i think often the long and direct path is the only way you actually get there. This is a big thing in my book wanderlust where when you walk in the sharp style labyrinth the first step you walk almost directly to the center and you can think, im going to go right to the center then you have to turn your back on the subject to continue following the elaborate and faced every possible direction you go back to the outer rim. The real question of the labyrinth. Hi, im rebecca too. When you have a chance to in new york to vote for Elizabeth Warren because she dropped out. Are you endorsing another hecandidate . A back solution suddenly turn into Elizabeth Warren and ill tell you later. I have to say i have to say you are awake or of the mayor who you would think you would have other things to do was tweeting Elizabeth Warren today and i feel like the whole way its being framed that the lady has to go serve a man i have a really big problem with i want to Green New Deal i have met a car for all that might suggest some leanings. I think she does too but theres all so much strategy to it. Is it impolitic to endorse the person whos not going to win . Does complicate things for the winter. To say i will support whoever wins 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. Its weird and messed up. Thats probably more than i should have said. Lets take one question does not invoke bernie and biden at least. Hello, i just want to thank both of you for speaking. Something very validating and seeing confident and strong women speaking and also having a room of people who are also validating that importance in some way. I wanted to start with something because the other day my roommates and i were talking about what the world would look like if women were taught to have the confidence that men were taught and i think im always trying to teach myself confidence in certain ways and more often then not women needs to teach the feminist by class. What class . Feminist bike maintenance class. It was crazy because we had all these women come but we needed the presence of women and women demonstrating to show that this is actually something women can do and that it was this mantra is to start the class we used to read, you are the gospel in knoxville tennessee. I also wanted to have a comment because you and i met when i was working in a bookstore. That was lovely. Briefly you told me that i am in the process, i was living in aand working there. I was in the process of accumulation before distribution. All the women that live there really incredible women we still up to this day are all always messaging each other and saying like, whats your distribution right now . What are you accumulating . We always still talk like this. I would like to first tell you that you gave me validation and i wrote my first novel about violence against women in the southeast. I just wanted to see what you are mantra or daily routine is to try to bring women in because i find myself trying to like reach out to people like i remember your idea or what your daily mantra for women . I dont know that i have a daily mantra. I have many many aphorisms ive made up for various, they are all situational. I want to go back to talking about confidence because i dont think we need to a lot of you know the tshirt that says cegod gave me the confidence of mediocre white man. Nothing against white men that arent mediocre. [laughter] there is many marginalized and oppressed people suffer from less confidence than they should have. Many people in opposite situation suffer from more confidence than they should have. And there is men who feel entitled to explain things without finding out that the person theyre talking to actually understand it without grasping that they dont. I actually think overconfidence just like and this is the book very much about what it means to not have a voice, Harvey Weinstein victims didnt have enough voice to get him arrested and prosecuted for all those years. He had too much voice. I often think theres a meeting in the middle, speaking of the waters of getting over gender segregation and categories like 80s feminism was often caliberation means being like men. I think like voice. I think theres confident enough thats not overconfidence but i just wanted to say that you see people who are really confident about what they are doing. I think doubt can be really useful thing. Theres a happy amount of it thats why, is this really who i am . Is this what i want to be doing . The capacity to question to yourself and Everything Else can be really constructive but im so glad to know that i succeeded in one of my missions in life which is to encourage young woman. The woman i was with my step greatniece is doing great at uc merced, is the daughter of a single mom who had to raise her younger siblings because her mom worked three jobs to keep them housed going to paris was a great dream in life. She was very wonderful. She wants to be a pediatrician and i believe shes actually get to make it even though shes the kind of person you would look at teenage mom, teenage single mom people wouldnt expect much of it was so exciting to travel with her because everything was new to her i could go to paris i did some book signing book tour stuff i could of been like super grumpy like i have to go to europe and do a book tour just to be with somebody whos so full of wonder and to be a Shakespearian Company which is such a magical place and so full of people was wonderful. Thank you for bringing that back. I will text her tonight and say paths of cross again. Congratulations on your novel you want to take more questions . The last lady for sure. Lets have you all you were standing up and then 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. I will say thank you to you all after this. Thank you to my amazing publicist maia and sarah who put together the most amazing tour i could ever dream of and im devastated we dont get to do it. And my editor paul whos been my editor since 1993, which is the most longterm monogamy even though ive slept around with other publishing houses but we will talk about that. Longterm commitment. Rohi, the story about your friend handing the writing desk to you really moved me. Im constantly aching about the ways and becoming like my mother and the things i inherit from the women in my family or the women around me. Before i can go ahead and explain that its always viewed not to be pleasant because the violence women grow 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 really tough question because one of my grandmothers was the case to be a paranoid schizophrenic but i think she just had may have had severe refugee abprobably from what i know from relatives a battered woman that was like grandfather my mother was a battered woman. Its interesting because my mother in some ways is a feminist and in some ways was as a friend of mine who was my best friend for a long time and dated a brother of mine for two weeks and saw my mothers treatment of her completely change stop my mother was boy crazy. The faraway nearby is probably very troubled and challenging relationship with my mother who died in 2012 when youre just trying to survive someone you cant see the rest of it my mom had a deep moral sense a passionate connection she did fair housing work in the 1960s after she divorced my father she became the accountant for battered womens shelter for years. There is 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 she also had the kind of new yorker willingness to getting your face and then theres much or complexing. She really love trees and flowers and books and novels and thomas hardy and things like that. I inherited a lot of anxiety and selfdoubt from her. But i think there was an ethical core in my brother as well thats not one elses job my paternal grandmother who was supposed to be the schizophrenic i found some cards from her recently. She was a lovely person i didnt know how to recognize that we would both benefited so much had i even known what love looks like and how to accept affection but i was so walled up to survive that i did it. She died when i was 20 my other grandmother stated queens the rest of her life until the very end. She was a rosie the riveter a daughter of the irish immigrant who died giving birth to her. They are with me in various ways. I think that moral core is ntimportant and it did come fro a mothers background from that in some ways from irish people before they were just more white people there was a radical lineage in their family as outsiders as antibritish. Hello. I thought we were leaving the first time waved goodbye. Thank you for coming up to ask. Somebody want to tilt the mic down for them . Me and my friend avery were wondering what advice you have for young feminists and climate activists who want to change the world . There is a wonderful thing my friend Bill Mckibben has been a great climate activists for 30 years says, you didnt ask this question but a lot of times people say, what can i do as an individual . He says, stop being an individual. Meeting joints and think about finding your people. This can be a really wonderful thing. The kids who been doing fridays for future looks like you mightve been doing that. Have you done that . I love you, youre the best. Just such wonderful amazing people and feminism i think often means working really hard at whats going on from a gender perspective and finding people. Often as women we are told that didnt happen that didnt matter, we are going to trust anyones verdict before you. Find people who have who back you up. Find people who value you. Find people who believe in you and believe you when you say that something happened in those of the people you want to be with. Those are the people who are feminist. I hope you find both of those t people 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 and generous and exclude inclusive and open as Carbon Neutral as possible. [laughter] dont laugh at Carbon Neutral its serious we need to leave it in the ground. And 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 where we could leave it all behind and make the transition. One of the things thats nice about being really old 58 3 4 is really old. Having lived long enough to see the arc of change. Our 17yearold son last week im so crushed by warrens defeat is ever going to change and i was able to say, when i think about how terrible the world was to women when i was born, i know it has changed so much and know that people are here who are going to change it and let people who are going to be here afternoon here going to keep changing it because unraveling 5000 years of patriarchy is a big project. Weve done so much in 50 years. The Climate Movement which was almost nothing in 2000 is so powerful and effective and creative and inspired right now challenged in many ways we need to scale it up but i believe we can win and i think everyone is trying i think you all so much. Thank you, thank you rebecca for coming out. [applause] [inaudible background conversations] tonight on booktv and primetime historian lindsay stravinsky looks at George Washingtons president ial cabinet. Fair vote senior fellow david daily reports on efforts around the country to combat election tampering. In former george w. Bush Administration Secretary of state Condoleezza Rice talks about the National Security threat thats posed by the coronavirus pandemic. Also this evening, our after words interview of former fbi Deputy Director andy mccabe discusses his career and firing. We take a look at author programs about technology. Find more information in your program guide. As the coronavirus continues to impact the country, heres a look at what the Publishing Industry is doing to address the ongoing pandemic. Former First Lady Michelle Obama has announced a weekly childrens story time that will stream every monday at 12 pm eastern until may 20 and available to watch online at pbs kids Youtube Channel or Penguin Random house facebook page. North americas largest book industry conference book expo has canceled this years show. Scheduled to take place in new york city. The conference was originally set for the spring and then moved back to july before permanently canceled. The American Booksellers Association independent bookstore day has been rescheduled for august 29. In the aba has announced a Virtual Bookstore Party to be held from april 19 to the 25th. It will include events and promotions with participating stars. Also in the news npd bookscan report sales were up 2. 9 percent for early april from your higher led by holiday, educational, and kids books. Adult nonfiction sales decline of 28 percent from the same time in 2019. Book festivals and conferences continue to be canceled or rescheduled. The American Library Association Conference this summer it should go well the citys printers which facet for scheduled for june will take place in september. So in the Los Angeles Times for schoolbooks has also decided to push back there 25th annual festival to october. Booktv will continue to bring you new programs and publishing news. You can watch all of our archive programs any time at booktv. Org. And probably a bit for the better. But i think at the same time that some decisions have led us to better consequences as joy just said we live in a fragile world today and as a class of complex and dcu