Recommendations
Books Like Men Explain Things to Me
Best books to read after Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit
Men Explain Things to Me connects a specific, absurd conversational encounter to the structure of violence against women. These 8 books share its range across personal anecdote and structural argument, its attention to the relationship between everyday condescension and catastrophic harm, and its commitment to naming things clearly.
- 1Buy
Bad Feminist
by Roxane Gay
Gay's 2014 essay collection is Men Explain Things to Me's closest companion in the feminist essay tradition — both appeared in 2014, both range across popular culture and political analysis, both are accessible to readers who don't come to feminism through academic theory, and both make sustained arguments about the relationship between everyday cultural patterns and structural gender inequality.
- 2Buy
Sister Outsider
by Audre Lorde
Lorde's 1984 foundational collection is the most important predecessor to Men Explain Things to Me in the feminist essay tradition — it established the mode of Black feminist essay-speech that insists on the personal as political and that refuses to separate the everyday experience of being talked over from the structural conditions that produce it.
- 3Buy
We Should All Be Feminists
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie's 2014 extended essay brings a Nigerian-American perspective to the feminist argument that Men Explain Things to Me makes from a white American context, and together the two books represent the breadth of contemporary feminist public writing — both accessible, both reaching far beyond academic audiences, both insisting that feminism is not about man-hating but about acknowledging structural inequality.
- 4Buy
The Argonauts
by Maggie Nelson
Nelson's 2015 autotheory memoir is the most formally ambitious feminist nonfiction of the decade and the natural companion to Solnit's more accessible essays for readers who want to go deeper — where Men Explain Things to Me makes clear arguments about clear targets, The Argonauts holds contradictions, refuses resolution, and investigates the structures of identity and love with the same rigor Solnit applies to violence.
- 5Buy
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
by Rebecca Solnit
Solnit's 2005 collection — including her meditation on the blue of distance as a frame for thinking about longing and the unknown — is the most literary and contemplative of her books and a natural next read after Men Explain Things to Me for readers who want more of her essayistic range; it is also the Solnit book most directly in dialogue with Maggie Nelson's Bluets.
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The Empathy Exams
by Leslie Jamison
Jamison's 2014 essay collection is the third great feminist essay collection of 2014 (alongside Bad Feminist and Men Explain Things to Me) and the most philosophically rigorous of the three — where Solnit makes arguments and Gay observes contradictions, Jamison investigates what it means to acknowledge another person's pain and turns that investigation on herself with equal severity.
- 7Buy
Feminism Is for Everybody
by bell hooks
hooks's 2000 accessible introduction to feminist theory is the foundational companion to Solnit's more polemical work — clear, uncompromising, and addressed to readers encountering feminism for the first time, it explains the concepts that Men Explain Things to Me takes for granted and gives the political framework that makes the essays cohere as an argument.
- 8Buy
Know My Name
by Chanel Miller
Miller's 2019 memoir about the Brock Turner case gives the argument of 'Men Explain Things to Me' — that the credibility deficit women face in everyday conversation extends to the legal system's treatment of sexual violence — a specific, devastating case study, and reading it alongside Solnit's essay is one of the most direct demonstrations of how her structural argument works in an individual life.
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