![]() ![]() "This is about everybody," Solnit says of Mother. "Or at least we laugh when we hear them, out of surprise or discomfort or recognition." The 11 galvanizing essays in her latest collection include Solnit's choice not to be a mother a portrait of an American family whose son, Christopher Michael-Martinez, was killed in a 2014 murder spree in Isla Vista, California and a rigorous study of the ways in which sexism silences both men and women. ![]() ![]() "Telling startling and transgressive truths is funny," she writes in "The Short Happy Recent History of the Rape Joke," an essay in her twentieth book, The Mother of All Questions(Haymarket). Solnit-maximal feminist, ardent climate activist-is a master of exposing the malevolent underbelly of everyday situations. But: "It's sort of not funny, because then he threatened to kill me." She was 19, she says, strolling San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf, when she realized she was being followed by "a well-dressed white man murmuring a long string of vile sexual proposals to me." This is a familiar scenario to tonight's mostly female audience we wait for the punch line: "When I turned around and told him to fuck off, he told me I had no right to speak to him like that." We laugh. It's a cool October evening, and writer Rebecca Solnit is onstage at Columbia University's Miller Theatre telling a story. ![]()
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