It's a cool October evening, and writer Rebecca Solnit is onstage at Columbia University's Miller Theatre telling a story. 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. But: "It's sort of not funny, because then he threatened to kill me."

Solnit—maximal feminist, ardent climate activist—is a master of exposing the malevolent underbelly of everyday situations. "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, (Haymarket). "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. "This is about everybody," Solnit says of Mother. "All of us live in a culture that is attempting to limit the range of our humanity, and so we're all in this liberation struggle."

To call Solnit prolific doesn't capture the depth or magnitude of her work—when her good friend Sam Green, the Oscar-nominated documentarian behind 2002's The Weather Underground, sees her, he likes to joke, "Hey, Rebecca, did you publish a book today?" Sometimes, he says, the answer is yes. While she studied English and art history at San Francisco State University and journalism at UC Berkeley, she's a polymath who's taken on a staggering variety of subjects: from a little-known 1950s West Coast avant-garde art movement (Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era, 1990), to Irish history and culture (A Book of Migrations, 1997), to the neighborly altruism that arises in the wake of disasters like 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina (A Paradise Built in Hell, 2010), to her mother's experience with Alzheimer's intercut with a trip Solnit took to Iceland (The Faraway Nearby, 2013).

Solnit's writing is discursive in the way of a Bach organ fugue—each seeming tangent resonates thematically, layering in meaning and feeling to gloriously virtuosic effect. It can be astounding to realize that in just two pages she's woven together a Tang Dynasty artist, a Road Runner cartoon, a mythological creator deity, and her mother's complicated emotional state (The Faraway Nearby)—and that you feel moved, intellectually provoked, and elevated all at once. "He painted a hundred-foot scroll that replicated all his travels in one continuous flow," she writes of that Tang Dynasty artist, Wu Daozi. "He made all his paintings boldly and without hesitation, painting like a whirlwind, so that people loved to watch the world emerge from under his brush." She might as well be describing her own writing.

Solnit's writing is discursive in the way of a Bach organ fugue—each seeming tangent resonates thematically, layering in meaning and feeling to gloriously virtuosic effect.

Yet for a long time, Solnit remained more or less under the pop-cultural radar. Yes, her books were reverently reviewed (Faraway was called a "gorgeously written and insightful book" by Publishers Weekly; Kirkus deemed Migrations "truly exceptional, a paradise for readers of travel literature"), and yes, New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner heaped praise on her in 2009, calling her "the kind of rugged, off-road public intellectual America doesn't produce often enough." But he also labeled her a "West Coast" social critic, a ghettoizing dismissal that her friend Green thinks may have kept her out of the mainstream even as her work was passed around among second-wave feminists, environmentalists, and native San Franciscans as almost a delicious secret. "It's interesting to wonder: If she were a New York writer," Green muses, "would she be Susan Sontag by now?"

Solnit, age 21, in her first San Francisco apartment

She's getting closer. It was in 2014 that Solnit blew up, as it were, with the publication of . The title essay inspired the term mansplaining, now so ubiquitous it's splashed across T-shirts (behind the universal symbol for "no"). The book has sold more than 100,000 copies, with Lena Dunham pronouncing it "the most clarifying, soothing, and socially aware document I've read on [being a woman] this year."

As Dunham's populist stamp of approval suggests, Men Explain Things earned the now 55-year-old Solnit an enthusiastic new fan base among young women. At a New York Public Library panel in October to discuss the author's work, a woman sitting next to me, wearing a long black dress slit thigh-high, paired with white Nikes, mentions that she's celebrating her thirty-second birthday. "Oh my God," she says breathlessly. "I cannot wait for Rebecca Solnit." Emily Gould—the writer and former Gawker blogger who now runs Emily Books, a website dedicated to "weird books by women"—says Solnit is a favorite of twenty- and thirtysomething feminists. That's in part because she staunchly avoids chastising "the youth," unlike some establishment feminists who, Gould says, "want you to know upfront that they fought and suffered for things you take for granted. That can get in the way of people who should have everything in common understanding each other, or working toward the common cause."

The title essay of Men Explain Things is based on an encounter Solnit had with an older man at his Aspen house party in 2003; he expounds at great length to her about a recent biography of Eadweard Muybridge, the pioneering stop-motion photographer famous for his image series of a horse galloping—talking over her friend's efforts to tell him that Solnit herself had written the book. "I like incidents of that sort," Solnit writes, "when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that's eaten a cow." Peggy Orenstein, the author of last year's best-seller Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape, likens the essay's reception to the feminist "click moments" of the 1970s, when "something you knew deep in your bones that nobody had ever quite articulated zapped into focus."

Why hasn't it bothered me that my academic mentors were exclusively men? Why do I feel competitive with my female classmates (and, later, colleagues) but not male?

I can relate. Raised on the girl-power feminism of the '90s—Spice Girls, The Vagina Monologues, Hermione Granger, Daria—my friends and I didn't think we needed feminism. We thought the battle for women's rights had already been won. Besides, feminism carried uncomfortable anti-man connotations, amplified by "empowered" female pop-culture icons from Katy Perry to Madonna, who denounced the term as exclusionary. "I'm not a feminist, I'm a humanist" was a popular refrain. But then, in Men Explain Things, I read about Solnit, six or seven or nine books into her career and still having her own thoughts explained back to her by men. In the same collection, I read her trenchant take on FBI whistle-blower Coleen Rowley, who issued pre-9/11 warnings about Al Qaeda and was ignored by her mostly male colleagues. I read about how an unnamed American university responded to campus rapes by telling young women to stay inside after dark. I started to wonder: Why do I gravitate toward books by male authors? Why hasn't it bothered me that my academic mentors were exclusively men? Why do I feel competitive with my female classmates (and, later, colleagues) but not male? Without being conscious of it, I'd put the men in a different, more exalted category; my definition of "winning" essentially meant taking home the silver, or the bronze. The guys would land three out of four of the top jobs, and they'd dominate the conversation—whether on literature or abortion, whether at parties or in the serious matte pages of the New Yorker. Click.

I meet Solnit for the first time at the 34th Street entrance to the Manhattan High Line—the park built on an abandoned elevated freight-rail line that stretches along the city's West Side—soon after her early October arrival in New York as Columbia University's "visiting artist and thinker." The monthlong residency coincided with the release of yet another book, Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, the final installment in a series that unearths the lesser-told stories of three major American cities (the other two are New Orleans and her hometown of San Francisco) through artists' renderings of maps and thematically diverse essays by herself and others. The New York iteration, coedited by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, includes one map that marks the locations and costs of Manhattan's private SAT tutoring centers and schools, alongside public parks and libraries (which are, of course, free), and another that reimagines the subway system with every stop named for an impressive woman—Joan Didion, Alicia Keys, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. "Almost every city is full of men's names, names that are markers of who wielded power, who made history, who held fortunes," Solnit writes. The implicit question: What if we lived in a city that celebrated us?

It was Solnit who suggested that we simply walk from one point to another for our interviews, a welcome but unsurprising choice from such a passionate map lover—and the woman who wrote, in Wanderlust: A History of Walking, "I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour." She arrives wearing a black leather cowboy hat, dark boot-cut jeans, and the kind of unfussy, utilitarian sneakers that were an outdoorsy northern California staple long before normcore showed up in East Coast closets. Hers are navy. She keeps her pale blue eyes trained at a middle distance as we walk, except when she occasionally beams them at me or down at the recorder, as though she's just remembered it's there. At one point she'll note, with some satisfaction, that her bright blond hair, which her jealous brunette mother used to call "unfair" while acidly assuring her it would soon darken, is "on its way to turning white without having gone all brown."

Over the many hours (and miles) we spend together, I get used to Solnit's frequent interjections about the scenery that off-board us from one train of thought to another. On the High Line, she stops to peer at a cluster of insects on a handrail that we guess is an entomological orgy (Google later informs me that it was merely dinnertime for some milkweed bugs). On our last walk, as I'm waiting to meet her in Riverside Park, I spot her taking a photo of the Eleanor Roosevelt monument, her face an expression of pure delight. (According to Nonstop Metropolis, only five of some 150 statues in New York's five boroughs depict real, named women.)

The success of Men Explain Things heralded changes to important aspects of Solnit's life. Soon after its release, she became the first female Easy Chair columnist at Harper's magazine since its inception in 1851. Even Beyoncé has given her a shout-out, posting an excerpt from Solnit's deeply personal 2005 investigation of desire and memory, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which many believe sparked Blue Ivy's name: "The world is blue at its edges and in its depths...the light that gets lost gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is the color blue."

The best part of her broader acclaim, Solnit says, is that it affords her more time to write. "I'm really lucky now with foreign sales and bigger book sales. I don't have to do as much teaching and speaking as I had been." And the book that followed Men Explain Things was quintessential old-school Solnit: The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness, a sprawling, 300-plus-page collection of essays about everything from cannibalistic Arctic polar bears to atomic explosions in Japan.

Through her writing, Solnit has built a varied network of friends and allies. On her New York trip, she's staying in the empty apartment of installation artist Ann Hamilton, and she has coffee with Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia University student who carried a mattress with her for a year to protest the school's handling of her alleged rape. "Growing up around queer culture in San Francisco, there's a strong sense of 'Make your own family,' " Solnit says, "that your well-being depends on many relationships." Though Solnit says she isn't opposed to marriage, she's never done it, in part because she just doesn't believe in "that pioneer pair-bonding thing where all you need is your husband or wife. It's like a structure built on one pillar, and that pillar can be knocked down."

Solnit describes her younger self as "a weird, rejected, battered kid."

Nevertheless, Solnit has had several long-term romances and, accordingly, breakups. "You go through one or two or seventeen of those tragedies in your teens and twenties, and then you're like, 'Oh, I'm going to suffer unbearably for a month and feel blue for another three months, then I'm going to be fragile, and then I'm going to be fine.'" At the moment, she's in an "excellent" relationship, she says. While she once did most of her writing alone at her kitchen table, these days she sometimes writes at her boyfriend's house, too.

As for having children, I dared to ask her the kid question, even though The Mother of All Questions begins with an anecdote about giving a lecture on Virginia Woolf and having the audience engage almost exclusively on whether or not the author should have procreated: "What I should have said to that crowd was that our interrogation of Woolf's reproductive status was a soporific and pointless detour from the magnificent questions her work poses," Solnit writes. "After all, many people make babies; only one made To the Lighthouse and Three Guineas, and we were discussing Woolf because of the latter." Now, Solnit says she "might have [had children] under ideal circumstances, but I was around a lot of guys who would have made me a single mother, at best."

Solnit describes her younger self as "a weird, rejected, battered kid." Growing up in a middle-class suburb of San Francisco, she was the sole daughter in a "superviolent, misogynistic" family of four children, she says. Her father, Al, was a county planner with a scathing temper: "One summer evening when I was about nine," she writes in A Field Guide, "my father came home late and found a forgotten glass of chocolate milk gone sour on the kitchen counter. Waste enraged him, and since I was the principal drinker of chocolate milk, he rushed into my room, flicked the light on, and dashed it in my face as I slept." As for her mother, based on the labyrinthine portrait Solnit sketches of her in The Faraway Nearby, she'd married the wrong man—and given birth to the wrong daughter, a girl whom she thoroughly resented because of her striking physical resemblance to her mother's younger, more confident sister. Solnit says that she spent much of her youth trying to escape her family; as an adolescent, she attended a Buddhist silent retreat with one of her brother's friends, a 19-year-old gay man she deems "the first really kind male figure in my life." While, for most teenagers, 14 days without speaking would classify as a Herculean achievement, "I'd been silent for 14 years," Solnit says evenly, "so two more weeks didn't really make a difference."

Solnit took the GED at 15 and enrolled the following year at the local College of Marin, where she happened upon a pamphlet about study-abroad programs—which offered her a way to extricate herself from both her family and a "creepy older boyfriend." She landed on Paris, in part because she'd become entranced by Romanesque art, but also because she was toying with becoming a model: She was tall and skinny, and thanks to her mother's job at a talent agency, she'd appeared as an extra in several movies (the best known of which was the Invasion of the Body Snatchers). At age 17, armed with a year of basic French, cash she'd saved from a job at a used-book store, and a semester's worth of tuition that comprised her college fund, Solnit enrolled at the American University in Paris. After a few shoots with small-time photographers, she abandoned the modeling plan: "The men in my family did a lot of body shaming, with my father the leader of the pack. It would've been difficult to be judged constantly." Her love of art stuck, however.

When—after a year and a half of full-time, scholarship-funded study—she returned to California, Solnit transferred to San Francisco State and soon moved into the studio apartment she'd rent for the next quarter century. After graduating in 1981, she enrolled in the journalism master's program at Berkeley while also working at MoMA San Francisco for the then-high wage of $7 an hour.

Although Solnit, as she says, "looked like a punk rocker and still was not the greatest communicator with people I regarded as grown-ups," she was given the task of researching and writing about major works of art for the museum's fiftieth-anniversary catalogue. When she finished at Berkeley at 22, Solnit was hired almost immediately as an editorial assistant by Artweek magazine, partially on the strength of her work at SFMOMA. She was officially a writer.

It was in the early aughts that Solnit started to add overtly political essays to her repertoire, writing predominantly for smaller lefty publications. "I give this to the Bush era," she says, explaining how she wanted to address the "incredible despair around me as the war in Iraq broke out." The specific catalyst came during a banner week in 2003: First, New York University convened a panel that brought together neurologist Oliver Sacks, historian Simon Schama, artist Chuck Close, and Solnit to talk about Eadweard Muybridge, that mansplained subject of her then-upcoming book, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (which would go on to win a Guggenheim Award). Her book Wanderlust was an answer on Jeopardy ("For $1,200, this impulse to travel is the title of Rebecca Solnit's book"). And she met Susan Sontag, at a New York Institute for the Humanities lunch. Afterward, Sontag invited Solnit to her apartment, and over hard-boiled eggs with pepper flakes in the famous critic's kitchen, Sontag asked for Solnit's input on a speech she was writing to honor a figure in Israel's anti-occupation movement. At which point Solnit remembers thinking, "Why am I not speaking directly to the hopes and fears of this very moment?"

The impulse birthed Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, her 2004 exploration of a concept that would become synonymous with the campaign of America's first black president— and which Solnit made available for free as an e-book the morning after Donald Trump's election. (It's since been downloaded 31,500-plus times.) "Here, in this book," she writes, "I want to propose a new vision of how change happens; I want to count a few of the victories that get overlooked….I want to start over, with an imagination adequate to the possibilities and the strangeness and the dangers on this earth in this moment." The pointillist essays in Hope in the Dark unpack a dizzying array of sociopolitical movements, showing how we got from the raising of the Berlin Wall to its dismantling in just 31 years; from a tiny group of "original activists" in London's nascent abolitionist crusade in 1785 to its flowering a quarter-century later in the U.S.; from the 1930s extinction of overhunted wolves in Yellowstone National Park to their return in 1995. "We are not who we were not very long ago," she writes.

When I reach Solnit at home in San Francisco the week after the election, she's the one who seems to need an injection of hope. "This is a massive disruption and crisis, and a lot of things could come of it," she says. "The scary thing is, a lot of what comes of it is up to us."

In her thirties, Solnit tells me, she and her brother were chatting about how much they both liked to run in Golden Gate Park. He ran only on back trails, he told her, so he could avoid seeing any cars. She was shocked—she ran only on the main road, because she was afraid of lurking men. This, to her, is perhaps one of the most profound and unsettling differences between men and women: the former's propensity for violence, often against the latter.

A few days before I was to meet Solnit for the first time, one of my college friends—a poet who for a few years postgraduation lived just blocks from my Brooklyn apartment—was stabbed to death, at home, by her male roommate. Almost in spite of myself, I tell Solnit about Carolyn—that was her name. I can't comprehend the young man's violence, I say, as anything but the result of a psychotic break. "Part of what I've tried to fight in my feminism is these stories that are exculpatory," Solnit replies. "If it's white men, they had mental health issues." Obviously some do, she continues, but the automatic assumption "avoids discussing how most violence, of every kind, is largely perpetrated by men," she says. "Mental illness, whether depression or psychosis, just disinhibits men. They follow patterns that are built into the culture."

He ran only on back trails, he told her, so he could avoid seeing any cars. She was shocked—she ran only on the main road, because she was afraid of lurking men.

One cause, she argues, is the "great renunciation" demanded by masculinity. "Emotions, expressiveness, receptiveness, a whole array of possibilities get renounced by successful boys and men in everyday life," Solnit writes in The Mother of All Questions. This level of repression is dangerous, she believes, making men both heavily armored and extraordinarily brittle.

I thought of Carolyn so many times over the hours I spent talking with Solnit. The Golden Gate Park story stopped me cold, for one, echoing as it does the famous Margaret Atwood line: "Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them." In a newspaper interview, Carolyn's murderer said that before he stabbed her he'd been disoriented and had asked Carolyn how to use his cell phone; her response, he said, was to ask if he was okay—and to laugh.

While I'm still reeling from the horror of Carolyn's death, the frame Solnit helped me put around it, her willingness to look at the thing straight on, was comforting. "In my taxi on the way over, there was a little scroll across the TV about a man who killed his girlfriend and himself," she says. "We don't talk about it as a pattern, let alone an epidemic. And we so need to. Things become so familiar they're invisible, and part of what you can do is look at it from the outside. I mean, What will they think of us in the future when it's like, 'We had buildings all over America for women and children to hide from fathers and husbands?' "

This article originally appeared in the March 2017 issue of ELLE.

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