In her memoir, Rebecca Solnit explores how she’s worked to find her voice in the violence. Citing her Victorian writing desk, given to her by a friend who was “stabbed fifteen times by an ex-boyfriend to punish her for leaving him.” Her friend survived, but the boyfriend was never prosecuted. Her friend had effectively been silenced. She asks if everything she has ever written is “a counterweight to that attempt to reduce a young woman to nothing.”
I shivered with recognition at her memories as a young woman alone and poor in a city. She’s been writing about misogynist speech and violence for decades, as well as the ways women have tried to counter this. Another one of my North Stars, she’s U.S. columnist for Guardian and her substack is Meditations in an Emergency.