Rebecca Solnit’s memoir begins in 1981, when she moved into a cheap studio apartment in San Francisco and started becoming a writer.

The city around her was being remade by punk, gay liberation, AIDS, activism, racial displacement and gentrification; inside the apartment, Solnit was trying to acquire a voice while learning how thoroughly women are trained to disappear, accommodate and remain alert to violence.

This is deliberately not a chronological confession or a parade of formative anecdotes. Solnit uses her younger self as a route into larger questions about whose testimony is believed, how fear reorganises movement through public space, and what writing can do when silence is socially rewarded. The apartment and the desk where she worked become part of that formation: material structures within which an apparently absent person gradually took shape. There are blind spots, particularly around her own position within San Francisco’s gentrification, but the book is most interesting where memoir becomes an inquiry into how private experience acquires public language.

Granta hardback, first UK edition, first printing, 2020. Good condition with considerable wear and small tears to the dust jacket; book itself sound.