Critical Analysis Of The Mother Of All Questions By Solenit

One of my major personal essay influences included Solnit’s Men Explain Things To Me (2014), within which Solnit recalls a single experience of sexism before reflecting upon the wider issue of mansplaining and the dismissive treatment faced even by women experts of their field. Once the essay had been spoken aloud in the lecture, few spoke up (of which ironically Solnit discusses in her following works, The Mother of All Questions: Further Feminisms (2017), which dissects gender and silence). Yet consulting the women in the room afterwards, all of us could describe a similar encounter that had taken place in the company of our fathers, male colleagues, fellow students. My aim became to write a piece that could similarly resonate with so many,

However, the obvious quickly occurred to me: I still feel a level of shame attached to that part of my identity whilst in the company of people I lived and went to school with, many of whom saw, and still see me, as straight. Only once I had brainstormed potential ideas did I realise that this uncomfortableness was reason in itself to examine it. I knew the purpose of the essay I set out to write would not be to portray myself in an idealised expert light, or even know the answers to half of my own questions; instead, it would be a confession to my own glorious mess. Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist (2014) embodies this openly self-critical approach, repeatedly emphasising through her personal essays that as a feminist, she is still constantly learning and making mistakes. It was vital for me to steer clear of wallowing in closeted self-pity or the other extreme of presenting myself as the hero of an uplifting success story fallacy, neither of which would be honest

In order to choose an important scene for my piece, I searched for photographs that had been taken during my high school years in order to vividly place myself back in that world, recalling the music we listened to, the films we watched, the clothes we wore. Many of these, I found, were snapped at sleepovers. For women, at least, these are events we all have differing experiences of to varying degrees, and are fascinating in the sense that, looking back in hindsight, all of us bore insecurities we were longing to share but were only able to years later, or in some cases, never quite managed it. I felt the reliability of this memory would spark a connection between writer and