Life Is Starchy

a review of Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit

All the writers I love depict their twenties as gritty and amorous, soused off of cheap wine and sweet with kisses on public transit. Missteps morph into successes by the next chapter. Like an am*zon pr*me package, independence appears overnight as a package deal with an apartment or  job or break-up. There is no mention of the silliness or the boredom, or when independence pulls back and you’re in your high school bedroom again, Robert Pattinson’s ashen face looking down at you from a 2009 Vanity Fair cover taped to the wall, his eyes saying what you both were thinking: this isn’t where you’re meant to be, beautiful girl! (he insisted I keep that in…)

I have never kissed on public transit though I did kiss outside a T stop once, and he held my face in his hands like a farmer holds a prized acorn squash. I am not a prized acorn squash and he dumped me 3 weeks later. I look for nonsensical metaphors in grocery stores and waste brain cells trying to decipher the thoughts and feelings of 23 year old men who had none, not about me at least. I wanted to write that sentence past tense but like the price of bulk almonds at whole foods, it wouldn’t be fair. 

Rebecca Solnit’s Recollections of My Nonexistence is smart, obviously, and a dusky portrait of San Francisco and herself in it. But if I wanted to read the writing of a sad woman I would read my own journal (or the the first draft of this essay *pulls at collar*). Female writers reflecting on their youth sometimes take on the sisyphean task of being taken seriously. There are metaphors in the grocery store, clouds in the coffee etc. But so much of life is meaningless and starchy: tapping through face filters on instagram and deciding whether or not to buy raspberries in the grocery store (they were on sale but I didn’t have a Marianos card so ultimately they were...not a good deal. And they were Driscolls which is unethical, I think). The raspberries are not a metaphor for my capricious lifestyle. Should I, like, write about them anyway?

Solnit does a good job at delineating the actually meaningful from the life starch, but even so, there is a heaviness to this one. I read this book but I got lost in all the words and then commas and then more words (sentences, even) and found myself thinking about how I should eat the raspberries and whether I should buy bread and smush them on peanut butter like an old-timey PBJ.