Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, into the bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, here I am Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

I'm very pleased to have as my guest, Rebecca Solnit, whose newest book is called Recollections of My Non-Existence.

It's a profound book. It moved me deeply, and let me say furthermore that this is the first time

we're doing a show under these coronavirus situations.

I'm in my home.

Rebecca is in her home, and we're going to talk to one another without being able to see one another.

A real first for bookworm.

Hi, Rebecca.

Hello, Michael.

What do you mean by my non-existence? I had the title before I wrote the book,

and the book in some ways is a reflection on it. It's most of all about all the forms of violence against women, the literal violence that leave some woman dead, some woman silent,

some woman pushed out of full participation in different social arenas.

But I also wrote about other social groups, gay men, native people, etc., who face other kinds of erasure.

And I also wrote about reading as a positive form of non-existence, where you withdraw from

your own life and your own physical being to enter another world and kind of float,

...