"Men Explain Things To Me" By Rebecca Solnit Poem by Anny Miner

I still don't know why Sallie and I bothered to go to that party. The people were all older than us in a dull and distinguished way. Our host was an imposing man who'd made a lot of money, said to me "So? I hear you've written a couple of books." I replied, "Several, actually."
He said it, in the way you encourage your friend's seven-year-old to describe flute practice, "And what are they about? "
They were actually about a few different things, the six or seven out by then, but I began to speak only of the most recent about Technological Wild West, my book on the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life. He cut me off as soon the title left my mouth. "And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?


So caught up was I in my assigned role as ingenue that I was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had come out simultaneouslyand I'd somehow missed it. He was already telling me about the very important book- with that smug look I know so well in a man holding fourth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.

So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, "That's her book." Or tried to interrupt him anyway.

Here, let me just say that my life is well sprinkled with lovely men, with a long succession of editors who have, since I was young, listened to and encouraged and published me, with my infinitely generous younger brother, with splendid friends of whom it could be said- likethe Clerk in The Canterbury Tales I still remember from Mr. Pelen's class on Chaucer- "gladly wouldhe learn and gladly teach." Still, there are these other men, too.

But he just continued on his way. Shehad to say, "That's her book" three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn't read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless- for a moment, before he began holding fourth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and we've never really stopped.