the mother of all questions essay

The Mother of All Questions

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In a timely follow-up to her national bestseller Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit offers indispensable commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more.

In characteristic style, Solnit mixes humor, keen analysis, and powerful insight in these essays.

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Rebecca Solnit’s Faith in Feminist Storytelling

By Moira Donegan

About a decade ago, the writer Rebecca Solnit was in the U.K. promoting “Storming the Gates of Paradise,” a book about politics, and she gave a live talk before an audience. Her interviewer, a man, asked her—unprompted—why she did not have children; when she demurred, he wouldn’t let the subject drop. “No answer I gave could satisfy him,” Solnit writes in her new collection of feminist essays, cheekily titled “ The Mother of All Questions .” “His position seemed to be that I must have children, that it was incomprehensible that I did not, and so we had to talk about why I didn’t, rather than about the books I did have.”

The anecdote is a self-conscious corollary to a famous incident in Solnit’s earlier feminist work, “Men Explain Things to Me.” In that story, a man summarized Solnit’s own book to her, based on a review he’d read, confidently oblivious that she was the author and incredulous that a woman could have more authority on a subject than he did. The story resonated with readers and became more famous than the book itself, popularizing the portmanteau “mansplaining” to describe women’s experiences of being presumed ignorant and unqualified by men. Search the hashtag on Twitter and you’ll find hundreds of stories of mansplaining, each recounted with palpable irritation and pain. During the height of the hashtag’s heyday, in 2015, a few women recounted being told by men how the menstrual cycle works. Another user, Alba Waterhouse, was told by a man how most effectively to learn a new language. “A monolingual man,” she clarified. “I speak four languages.” Often, the man’s own lack of qualifications or experience with the subject is what stings the most: the sense is that, no matter what a woman achieves, a man will always consider his gender to outweigh her credentials.

“The Mother of All Questions” is filled with this sort of storytelling, with Solnit drawing anecdotes of female indignity or male aggression from history, social media, literature, popular culture, and the news. She talks about the men who explained to her that “Lolita” was an allegory after she expressed pity for the title character in an essay online; she talks about the young student at Bard College who was forced to sign a nondisclosure agreement before the school would allow her even to report her rape; she talks about Elliot Rodger, the man who committed a mass shooting, in 2014, because he was mad that women declined to sleep with him. The main essay in the book is about the various ways that women are silenced, and Solnit focusses upon the power of storytelling—the way that who gets to speak, and about what, shapes how a society understands itself and what it expects from its members. “The Mother of All Questions” poses the thesis that telling women’s stories to the world will change the way that the world treats women, and it sets out to tell as many of those stories as possible.

Anecdotal storytelling of this kind has long been a tool of feminist organizing. Women have always confided to other women about their experiences of being mistreated by men—it’s easy to imagine that the first time this kind of story was told was the first time two women were left alone without a man in the room. For the women’s movement, storytelling first came into organized use, in the late nineteen-sixties, as so-called “consciousness-raising.” New Left women’s groups such as the New York Radical Women, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, and WITCH (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) began holding small, all-women meetings to discuss sexist oppression in their own lives. “First they complained about housework,” Solnit writes, recounting a conversation she had with the prominent West Coast feminist Susan Griffin. “And then they started talking about rape and violence and the grim stuff, breaking through the shame that had kept them silent and alone.” The meetings quickly became intimate; they took on an air of a confessional. Early consciousness-raising groups were overwhelmingly white and straight in ways that limited their analysis, but the members focussed on the class diversity among their ranks: early leaders such as Kathie Sarachild had gone to élite universities, while others were working class; the influential Irene Peslikis, for example, was a dropout who had grown up in immigrant Queens. The commonalities in their stories surprised them, and the shared experiences they discovered in those rooms became the foundation of how feminists of the second wave understood the nature of sexism.

Then, as now, the anecdotes shared among women cut through the recondite rhetoric of social theory. The stories are simple, personal, and have clear moral direction. “I was grabbed in the street.” “I was beaten by my husband.” “I was raped.” “I was belittled, talked down to, and disbelieved.” There are as many experiences of womanhood as there are women, but every woman who hears these stories has had something similar happen to her. One useful working definition of a woman might be “someone who experiences misogyny.”

Today the feminist anecdote is shared less often in formal consciousness-raising groups than in informal ones, under hashtags and in comment threads online. (Just this week, in response to sexual harassment allegations against the Fox News Host Bill O'Reilly, women have been gathering their own stories of workplace mistreatment on Twitter.) Solnit is particularly interested in the rise of the hashtag #yesallwomen, which was coined by a Muslim woman tweeting under the handle @gildedspine in response to Rodger’s anti-woman massacre. The hashtag went on to form a massive consciousness-raising discussion on Twitter. “Women began telling their stories of harassment, threats, violence, and fear, reinforced by each other’s voices,” she writes. (For her part, @gildedspine received a deluge of death threats from angry men, and for a time had to go into hiding.) Reading through the hashtag can be upsetting: women recount personal experiences of assault, rape, violence, and threats. They also express their own reflexive responses to these experiences, acknowledging that the constant threat of rape and violence is something they’ve become accustomed to. “#Yesallwomen because ‘I have a boyfriend’ is more effective than ‘I’m not interested’—men respect other men more than my right to say no,” one tweet read. The writer and editor Sasha Weiss, who wrote about the hashtag at the time for this Web site, tweeted, “Because if I know I will be out til after dark, I start planning my route home hours, even days, beforehand #yesallwomen.” “It was loud, discordant, and maybe transformative,” Solnit said of this online feminist outpouring. “Not necessarily new, but said more emphatically, by more of us, and heard as never before.”

It can be troubling to consider just how pervasive and not-new this tradition of feminist storytelling really is; after all, if telling these stories had the power to change the way women are treated, why do we still have so many stories to tell? In the nineteen-seventies, this became a point of debate within the feminist movement, with women arguing over whether consciousness-raising was essential or tangential to affecting political change. At one point, Betty Friedan referred to the consciousness-raising groups as “therapy,” which she did not mean as a compliment. The tradition of the feminist anecdote encourages women to make their voices heard, but it is easy to see this long history of tweeting, consciousness-raising, and speaking out not as a victory but as a defeat. Reading “The Mother of All Questions,” I found that Solnit’s faith in feminist storytelling, in the notion that amplifying women’s voices might truly have the power to transform the world, sometimes exceeded my own. It seems, instead, that there have been centuries of women raising their voices only to find that patriarchy is enduring and indifferent. After all, having the power to speak is not the same as a guarantee that you’ll be listened to.

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The Mother of All Questions

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Publisher Description

A collection of feminist essays steeped in “Solnit’s unapologetically observant and truth-speaking voice on toxic, violent masculinity” ( The Los Angeles Review ).   In a timely and incisive follow-up to her national bestseller Men Explain Things to Me , Rebecca Solnit offers sharp commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more. In characteristic style, “Solnit draw[s] anecdotes of female indignity or male aggression from history, social media, literature, popular culture, and the news . . . The main essay in the book is about the various ways that women are silenced, and Solnit focuses upon the power of storytelling—the way that who gets to speak, and about what, shapes how a society understands itself and what it expects from its members. The Mother of All Questions poses the thesis that telling women’s stories to the world will change the way that the world treats women, and it sets out to tell as many of those stories as possible” ( The New Yorker).   “There’s a new feminist revolution—open to people of all genders—brewing right now and Rebecca Solnit is one of its most powerful, not to mention beguiling, voices.”—Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times –bestselling author of Natural Causes   “Short, incisive essays that pack a powerful punch.” — Publishers Weekly   “A keen and timely commentary on gender and feminism. Solnit’s voice is calm, clear, and unapologetic; each essay balances a warm wit with confident, thoughtful analysis, resulting in a collection that is as enjoyable and accessible as it is incisive.” — Booklist

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JAN 2, 2017

The latest collection of essays from author and activist Solnit continues in the same vein as 2014 s popular Men Explain Things to Me with short, incisive essays that pack a powerful punch. This collection examines age-old philosophical questions: What does it mean to live a happy life? What is the role of art and entertainment in our day-to-day lives? How does language create myths about happiness and art? from a contemporary, feminist perspective. As Solnit chronicles recent events, including comedian Amy Schumer s parodies of rape culture, Esquire magazine s list of 80 books every man should read, Gamergate, and the Isla Vista massacre, the book s themes gain greater significance. Solnit argues that books, movies, and other forms of entertainment reinforce self-centered concepts of heroism and happiness that promote entitlement and decrease empathy. Solnit points out that women are frequent targets of this entitlement and decreased empathy, but she also credits men such as government whistle-blower Edward Snowden, stand-up comedian Hannibal Buress, and activist Richard Martinez, whose son was killed in a mass shooting, for standing up for their principles and carving out a less violent or self-centered definition of manhood. Chock-full of references to the work of women at the forefront of contemporary feminist thought, Solnit s essays will stir minds and spark further investigation.

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Rebecca Solnit asks The Mother of all Questions: Is a woman more than her womb?

Sadaf Ahsan: If you choose not to have children, the societal response is a sort of rejection, not just of a woman's choice, but of what it means to be a woman

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The Mother of All Questions By Rebecca Solnit Haymarket Books 175 pp; $14.95

The Madonna-whore complex, coined in 1925 by who else but Sigmund Freud, suggests that men view women as either saintly, pure, virginal “Madonnas” or sexual, seductive “whores.”

Rebecca Solnit asks The Mother of all Questions: Is a woman more than her womb? Back to video

“Where such men love they have no desire, and where they desire they cannot love,” Freud wrote, and while it may sound antiquated, the overarching theory could still be considered true today. In modern relationships, as the theory goes, men view their wives as mothers, and therefore, not sexual objects. But before childbirth, before marriage, and in any other capacity, a woman takes the role of the “whore” – a sexual viability.

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There also exists a sinister, patriarchal expectation in society that what we women are striving towards in our lives is, ultimately, childbirth. After all, that’s what our bodies were built for – right? If that is the case, and gender roles certainly suggest it is, then what does society make of the woman who works and, more importantly, the woman who chooses not to have a child? Like, ever?

“The mother of all questions” becomes for most women a sometimes heartfelt, sometimes condescending, always accusatory “why don’t you have children?” Perhaps you plan to one day, or perhaps you never plan to at all. Either way, if the answer is no, the societal response is a sort of rejection, not just of a woman’s choice, but of what it means to be a woman.

In The Mother of All Questions, Rebecca Solnit’s new collection of feminist essays, she writes, “Such questions seem to come out of the sense that there are not women , the 51 per cent of the human species who are as diverse as in their wants as mysterious in their desires as the other 49 per cent, only Woman , who must marry, must breed, must let men in and babies out, like some elevator for the species. At their heart, these questions are not questions but assertions that we who fancy ourselves individuals, charting our own courses, are wrong. Brains are individual phenomena producing wildly varying products; uteruses bring forth one kind of creation.”

While it seems to go without saying that a woman is more than her womb, this is also the part of the female body that no longer seems to be her own when it comes to reproductive rights or the way society still traditionally views a woman’s body around the world.

Candid as ever, to a biting and witty degree that lends a comforting familiarity, Solnit admits that she herself has never wanted children because she desires solitude in life and the room to invest the majority of her time into her work. To have or not to have children is not the question, she explains, but rather to ask the purpose of a woman to begin with. It’s a vicious cycle, and one that can be broken if we even just ask, “Would you ask a man that?”

In her essay “Silence Is Broken,” Solnit references Susan Griffin’s Pornography and Silence, in which Griffin quotes Norman Mailer on Marilyn Monroe, one of the most iconic celebrity female bodies in American media: “She is a mirror of the pleasure of those who stare at her.” Meaning, Solnit writes, “Monroe can stand in for any woman, all women who silence, hide, disguise, or dismiss aspects of themselves and their self-expression in pursuing male pleasure, approval, comfort, reinforcement. … Mailer, in calling Monroe a mirror of pleasure, fails to question what happens when the pleasure is routinely someone else’s. It’s a death of pleasure disguised as pleasure, a death of self in the service of others. It’s silence wrapped in pleasing nothings.”

It’s a silence that all women experience, whether they realize it or not, in the words they speak or through the choices they make. There are those who are told “their suffering and rights are of no consequence” at the hands of domestic violence, but then there are “the people who speak and are believed, and the consequence is that they disappear.”

This is a culture, Solnit explains, that insidiously and silently makes it clear that men’s voices count for more than women’s, that places a priority and a price tag on whose voice carries more weight, and where. We see the stark difference in movies and on television, and we see it in governing bodies.

To have or not to have children is not the question, but rather to ask the purpose of a woman to begin with

Solnit wrote her latest collection from 2014 to 2016, reminiscing on a new era of the women’s movement, praising a rejuvenated feminism. It may seem like futile idealization in a time when women are marching around the world for things our mothers and grandmothers marched for decades before. Yes, 52 per cent of white American women voted for the Trump administration in 2016, but, Solnit reassures, if this is a sign of anything, it’s that we do have the power to make a significant change and force the world to listen.

As much as social media has served as a way to silence and punish the marginalized – such as the week-long racial abuse of actress Leslie Jones on Twitter, which ultimately pushed her to temporarily leave the network – it has also offered a platform for many, as seen in discourse born online and via hashtags: including this year’s #yesallwomen about domestic violence, #ibelieveher in support of Jian Ghomeshi’s abuse victims, and #notokay, through which millions of women around the world revealed how they had been sexually assaulted in their lifetime in response to the leaked video of Trump talking about grabbing women “by the pussy.”

In the way we have reinvented conversation, for better and for worse, we can break gender roles, Solnit writes, and we can begin by “calling things their true name,” “listening particularly to those who have been silenced,” and by using privilege we have to lend a voice to others.

The activist’s message verges on motivational preaching, which seems like an unavoidable risk in a meditation on shifting the course of history and, in no small part, keeping the voiceless from being “dehumanized.”

When Solnit writes, “There is always someone struggling to find the words,” I wonder if she is referring to women of colour, to LGBT women, to women who have an invisible voice and don’t get much more than footnotes in The Mother of All Questions. Although she frequently references American social activist bell hooks, Solnit’s specific allusions to minority women lack substance and the direct citation they so sorely need. If “the history of silence is central to women’s history,” it is far more intersectional than Solnit demonstrates. And yet, her words still ring true with a uniquely fierce indignation that feels necessary.

• ‘One of the voices of our age’: Roxane Gay’s Difficult Women is as varied as women’s experiences
• On Stephen Marche’s The Unmade Bed, and how to include men in the new ‘intimate wave of feminism’

This “new” feminist era has clearly inspired Solnit. With her latest two books she has proved she has a knack for capturing whichever consequence of sexism is most on trend and presenting an antidote – in 200 pages or less. There was 2014’s pivotal Men Explain Things To Me, a cure for that most insufferable of male tendencies, mansplaining, a term she may not have coined but certainly introduced in concept.

Now, Solnit speaks for the Madonnas, the whores, and all the real women between when she dares to ask The Mother of All Questions: who are we, as women, if not just maternal figures? And how do we break through the silence to redefine what it means to be female? Resist, Solnit suggests, and while she doesn’t provide much more than encouragement, there is reassurance in her rage for those who need a reminder that they are not alone in their hunger for more.

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The Work Love Has to Do

Rebecca solnit’s radiant descriptions of today’s feminism could sound laughably oblivious. instead, they feel like a ray of hope in the dark..

Benjamin Frisch

What does it mean to be hopeful right now, when we have a president who is openly hostile to many Americans and hope can feel like a privilege reserved for those who aren’t targets? The day after Trump won the election, the writer and activist Rebecca Solnit, always an exacting observer of language and its uses, defined hope on Facebook as “not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine,” but rather the acknowledgement that “when you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others.” She also posted a link where her treatise on the topic, Hope in the Dark , could be downloaded for free.

That book was a call to action published during the difficult Bush years, in 2004, while the essays collected in Solnit’s new book, The Mother of All Questions , were composed between 2014 and 2016—years that Solnit credits with a revitalization of the American women’s movement. Of course, the 2016 election has since made a mockery of that narrative in the minds of many. It would be easy for Solnit’s radiant descriptions of this decade’s “gorgeously transformative” feminism to land, in today’s atmosphere, with the thud of an inadvertent joke. Instead, these essays make the case for placing one’s faith, and pouring one’s energy, into channels that can irrigate our culture under any regime: art, activism, and the telling of stories that animate both. The resulting collection provides, to borrow the author’s phrase, a bit of much-needed hope in the dark.

The book’s title, from an essay in Harper’s —where Solnit is a columnist—helps to frame Solnit’s exploration of the shapes women’s lives take, with or without the traditional linchpin of motherhood: She is interested in writing books and raising movements more than she is interested in changing diapers. In that titular essay, she lambastes interviewers who can’t seem to stop asking why doesn’t she have children. It’s a line of inquiry rife with assumptions about women’s role in the world, “a closed question,” Solnit says, intended to “push you into the herd or nip at you for diverging from it.” To Solnit, the open question—the motherlode—isn’t why a life fails to look a certain way, but how it can succeed in being meaningful, whether through parenthood or through “so much other work love has to do in the world.”

For Solnit, some of that other work entails playing the matriarch to a generation of younger feminists with refreshing generosity. While she was working on these essays, Bitch Media co-founder Andi Zeisler was accusing feminism of selling out completely, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz was complaining about young women’s “complacency.” Solnit, though, celebrates what others have dismissed as “hashtag feminism.” Social media, she writes, is “like a barn raising for ideas: innumerable people bring their experiences, insights, analysis, new terms, and frameworks. These then become part of the fabric of everyday life, and when that happens, the world has changed.” Not changed completely, perhaps, but changed enough to make room near the center for the voices that once clung for dear life to the edges.

Solnit also grapples eloquently with a challenge that dogs all feminist writing: How does one write about the oppression women suffer at the hands of men without reinforcing the atavistic idea that woman and man are inelastic designations, with little in common and nothing in between? Solnit argues for the importance of categories, the power of naming things, as a tool for confronting the problems we face. As a potent example, she points out that “we don’t even have a word, let alone a conversation, for the most common kind of mass homicide,” proposing the term familicide :

[T]he furious man who takes out children and other family members or sometimes coworkers or bystanders, as well as the woman who’s the main focus of his ire, and sometimes himself. The lack of a category means the lack of terms to describe a common phenomenon and thus to recognize its parameters and their commonness. If categories cage, this is a phenomenon overdue for containment.

At the same time, all categories are “leaky,” she writes, none more so than the ones that seek to capture our identities. “Really, what I’m arguing for is the possibility of an art of using and not using category,” she writes, “of being deft and supple and imaginative or maybe just fully awake in how we imagine and describe the world and our experience of it.” This is Solnit’s prose at its best: luminous with confidence that we can learn, that we may already be learning.

Solnit’s sentences thrum with conviction, but she is not, one feels in this book, writing to persuade anyone. The titular essay of her previous collection, Men Explain Things to Me —which opens with a man seeking to enlighten Solnit about the contents of her own book—is cracklingly funny, and perhaps for some readers, disarmingly so. This new book’s essays traverse similar territory without quite as much nimble variation in tone. In the newest essay in the book, “A Short History of Silence,” Solnit quotes the poet Adrienne Rich’s cutting critique of Virginia Woolf’s venerated “ A Room of One’s Own”: “Virginia Woolf is addressing an audience of women, but she is acutely conscious—as she always was—of being overheard by men.” Solnit seems to have banished that consciousness from some of these essays, and if the resulting prose occasionally wields her vast knowledge like a blunt object, it also serves up a heady feeling of liberation, rushing forward unimpeded by the effort to charm, to play it cool.

Feminism, Solnit writes, is “remaking the world” through the telling of women’s stories—an effort she deems both “wildly successful” and “extremely incomplete.” “A Short History of Silence” weaves together many of her primary threads: how telling one’s story affirms one’s personhood; how silence is imposed, especially on women; how the means of that silencing can range from snide interruption (or, as fans of Men Explain Things to Me labeled it, “mansplaining”) to physical violence. She writes: “Silence is forever being broken, and then like waves lapping over the footprints, the sandcastles and washed-up shells and seaweed, silence rises again.” Solnit’s voice shows us what it means to refuse to be drowned out, and how doing so creates the hope that you, along with many others, can change the world. “A free person tells her own story,” Solnit writes. “A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place.”

The Mother of All Questions by Rebecca Solnit. Haymarket Books.

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The Mother of All Questions Summary & Study Guide

The Mother of All Questions Summary & Study Guide Description

The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Solnit, Rebecca. The Mother of All Questions. Haymarket Books, 2017.

In each of the twelve essays included in this collection, Solnit addresses different but highly related issues pertaining to feminism.

In “The Mother of All Questions,” Solnit writes about the hypocrisy and discrimination of asking women why they do or not have children. She sees this as an example of a “closed question,” which has a predetermined answer and is asked with the intention of punishing any who deviate from that answer, and expresses her intention to instead ask “open questions,” those which provoke a person to reflect upon their own ways of thinking and broaden their perception.

In “A Short History of Silence,” the longest essay of the collection, Solnit deals with the importance of having a voice and the injustice, harm of being silenced, and the possibility of breaking through silence. Silence, she argues, exists as an institutional imposition and works to maintain itself in power. She traces through a large number of cases in which women were abused and then denied their voices, but then she ends by recounting how the feminist movement has been able to reclaim a space for women’s voices and shatter the silence they have suffered under.

In “An Insurrectionary Year,” Solnit reviews the breakthrough enjoyed by the feminist movement in the year 2014, including widely publicized sexual harassment and abuse cases against famous male celebrities. She argues that the previous work of feminists bringing the injustices of women into the public discussion and the potential of social media to amplify voices and conversations created the conditions necessary for this watershed.

In “Feminism: The Men Arrive,” Solnit addresses another aspect of the feminist breakthrough in 2014: namely, the significant number of men who began to take on feminist sympathies. She finds that male participation is necessary for the feminist cause, and sees it as a good sign that men are increasingly taking responsibility for themselves and other men with regard to sexual violence.

In “One Year after Seven Deaths,” Solnit writes about the Ilsa Vista massacre, in which a young man, fueled by misogynistic hatred, went on a shooting spree to kill women. She shows how American culture with all the misogynistic and violent messages it gives people is to blame for such tragedies. She also criticizes the proliferation of gun ownership as an unnecessary danger.

In “The Short Happy Recent History of the Rape Joke,” Solnit writes about how perceptions about jokes about rape have changed in the years around 2013-4, since some comedians have changed their minds about how to tell rape jokes and what rape jokes constitute. She draws a distinction between “punching down” and “punching up” in jokes such as rape jokes; in the former, one ridicules the victim, in the latter, the attacker. The shift in attitude has essentially been from punching down to punching up.

In “Escape from the Five-Million-Year-Old Suburb,” Solnit criticizes the from evolutionary biology of “Man the Hunter,” which posits that since prehistoric times men have been the active providers of the family while women have been the passive receivers. She argues both that women were in fact active participants and that an argument from history would not necessitate that changes should not be made in the present.

In “The Pigeonholes When the Doves Have Flown,” Solnit deals with the problem of how we use categories to deal with people in our everyday lives. On one hand, we must see through categories to the particularities of people so that we do not misjudge them; while on the other hand we must examine categories in order to deal concretely with various forms of discrimination.

In “80 Books No Woman Should Read” and a follow-up essay “Men Explain Lolita to Me,” Solnit deals with the problem of misogyny in literature. She argues that it is harmful not only to women but also to men to read stories in which women are degraded; women would lose their sense of self-worth, and men would feel empower to take abused women.

In “The Case of the Missing Perpetrator,” Solnit analyzes drinking guidelines for women issue by the Center for Disease Control, in which unintended pregnancy and violence are listed as potential consequences of excessive alcohol consumption by women. She argues that by phrasing the matter as a passive construction without mentioning men, who are the ones who inflict violence upon women and make them pregnant, the guidelines relieve them of their responsibility.

In “Giantess,” Solnit analyzes George Stevens’ 1956 film Giant about a rancher and his fiercely independent wife in a changing Texas. She shows how the film presents an example of a liberated woman who challenges societal norms and a man who loses much of his patriarchal power but does so gracefully.

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• Published: 24/08/2017
• ISBN: 9781783783557

The Mother of All Questions

Rebecca solnit.

Following on from the success of Men Explain Things to Me comes a new collection of essays in which Rebecca Solnit opens up a feminism for all of us: one that doesn’t stigmatize women’s lives, whether they include spouses and children or not; that brings empathy to the silences in men’s lives as well as the silencing of women’s lives; celebrates the ways feminism has shifted in recent years to reclaim rape jokes, revise canons, and rethink our everyday lives.

£ 12.99

A provocative collection of essays on feminism. Along with her bestseller Men Explain Things to Me , it should be given to everyone who has ever tried to "mansplain" something to you

Best of the Arts in 2017, i paper

Time and again she comes running towards you with a bunch of hopes she has found and picked in the undergrowth of the times we are living in. And you remember that hope is not a guarantee for tomorrow, but a detonator of energy for action today

John Berger

There's a new feminist revolution - open to people of all genders - brewing right now and Rebecca Solnit is one of its most powerful, not to mention beguiling, voices

Barbara Ehrenreich

Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including Orwell’s Roses , which was shortlisted for the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, Men Explain Things to Me, Wanderlust, The Faraway Nearby and Recollections of My Non-Existence , which was longlisted for the 2021 Orwell Prize for Political Writing and shortlisted for the James Tait Black Award. She is also the author of many essays on feminism, activism, social change, hope and the climate crisis. She lives in San Francisco and is a regular contributor to the Guardian and other publications.

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Orwell's roses, £ 9.99, whose story is this, the faraway nearby, recollections of my non-existence, £ 16.99, men explain things to me, call them by their true names, rebecca solnit on granta.com, essays & memoir | granta 127, arrival gates.

‘It was like trying to go back to before the earthquake, to before knowledge.’

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Rebecca Solnit discusses interweaving personal narratives with the lives of Mary Shelley and Che Guevara, paradoxes and Beyoncé.

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A Modern Mom Finds an Ancient Outlet for Feminist Rage

In Alexis Landau’s ambitious new novel, “The Mother of All Things,” the frustrations of modern parenting echo through the ages.

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By Eliza Minot

Eliza Minot is the author of the novels “The Tiny One,” “The Brambles” and, most recently, “In the Orchard.”

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THE MOTHER OF ALL THINGS, by Alexis Landau

What is the source of maternal rage? The answer is as infinite as it is ancient. In 1965, the poet and essayist Adrienne Rich, with small children underfoot, captured a possible explanation for this abyss in her journal when she described it as “a sense of insufficiency to the moment and to eternity.”

But where — for moms, for women — does this nagging feeling of insufficiency come from? From the misogyny that we grow up with? From the helpless outrage we bear as our messy, gorgeous, individual maternal experiences are flattened by society into a weirdly infantilized stereotype that’s placed, like a paper doll, into a two-dimensional dollhouse called “Motherhood”? Or does it come from the profound feeling of helplessness that accompanies the ability to give life to a human being, but be unable to ensure that life’s safety?

Ava Zaretsky, the diligent heroine of Alexis Landau’s ambitious and engaging new novel, “The Mother of All Things” (her third after “Those Who Are Saved” and “The Emperor of the Senses”), simmers with a steady rage that never fully erupts toward her kids (Sam, 10, and Margot, 13, who’s at the edge of “adolescence’s dark tunnel”) or her husband, Kasper, a preoccupied Los Angeles film producer. Rather, Ava’s rage burns beneath the surface, “so white and hot it blurred the contours of her body.” She is angry that, in a marriage of supposed equals circa 2019, Kasper can relocate to Sofia, Bulgaria, for a six-month film shoot without a second thought, while her own work as an adjunct art history professor is smudged out by the needs of her family. Her fury is also embedded, we later learn, in the powerlessness that comes with profound loss.

When the family joins Kasper in Sofia for the summer, the kids enroll in a day camp, allowing Ava to wander this mysterious city. Her curiosity and creativity bubble to the surface. She begins writing about an ancient Greek woman whose life parallels and dovetails with her own, and whose narrative is interspersed throughout the pages of the novel. By coincidence, Ava also reconnects in Sofia with an intimidating former professor named Lydia Nikitas and becomes involved in a group of women who participate in re-enactments of ancient rites and rituals, most notably the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Despite some moments that feel forced and overly earnest, particularly in the ancient narrative and the Nikitas story line, Landau’s writing is accessible, specific, lush and transporting. Her research is rigorous and full of elegant effort. The great success of this novel is the author’s sustained exploration of a woman in early midlife who, seething quietly on the inside but operating gracefully on the outside, bravely re-evaluates how her life has unfolded in order to progress as a mother to herself. Renderings of Ava’s childhood — a heartbreaking recollection of a favorite red belt, memories of a father’s girlfriend entering her life and then leaving it — are especially astute and rich.

At times, the novel’s disparate parts compete with rather than complement one another; some characters seem predictable, and certain ideas redundant. When things are meant to get weird, as in the rituals, it can feel more Scooby-Doo than genuinely haunting. For this reason, more than once, I felt like shaking the book like a snow globe, as if its fascinating contents, suspended, might set free more of its wildness.

Landau’s prose can also lift off the page, as it does in a prolonged memory of Ava’s first childbirth and its aftermath. Here, Landau’s writing is intimate, tender and full of terror. The sentences breathe with the softness of shared human experience across time — absolutely sufficient to the moment, and to eternity, too.

THE MOTHER OF ALL THINGS | By Alexis Landau | Pantheon | 336 pp. | $29

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