The Golden Notebook
Four notebooks for the parts of a life that will not cohere, and a fifth that tries to join them. Lessing own preface is impatient with how it got read.
Anna Wulf keeps four notebooks to hold the parts of a life that will not cohere, covering politics, Africa, love and fiction, and a fifth that tries to join them. Lessing’s 1962 novel was read as a feminist landmark; her own preface is impatient with that reading, and is worth the price of the book on its own.
Recommended by 2 People
Erica Jong
The thing that I thought so fabulous about Doris Lessing was that she created a heroine who was intellectual and sexual. Always in the past, the sexy heroines of men’s books have been idiots, but she asserted through her character of Anna that women were brains and bodies and that their brains and bodies interacted. I think that was so revolutionary.
Interview · August 2012
Maria Popova
In the preface to her 1962 classic The Golden Notebook (public library), she relays her advice to young people about how to read for maximum illumination:
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