Doris Lessing

So this was all happening also as I went to college.

I remember directing a play called Each His Own Wilderness by Doris Lessing for youth theater, and then subsequently Harold Pinter's The Lover.

David Cregan's Transcending.

These are the names that come to mind, apart from acting, of course.

Great for biographers, because you get the letters, you get almost everyone they met.

I was looking for a Doris Lessing file.

Why is she on MI5's radar? And it transpired that her husband was a member of the South African Communist Party.

So that was the angle they were looking at.

She's so clear-eyed, but not cold.

Quite a lot of the book is about her strange relationship with Doris Lessing.

I know that you hadn't heard of Doris Lessing, feminist icon, author of the Golden Notebooks, Nobel Prize winner.

I know,

I'm mortified.

She wasn't her adoptive mother.

She wasn't her carer.

But from when Jenny Diskey was about 14 until Doris Lessing died, they had an intimate relationship.

It was basically an author included got one book.

I think like Doris Lessing got the Golden Notebook for it.

Heller got Catch-22.

Anyway, a lot of, and it was a lot of, you know, sort of second and third tier British writers that I had never heard of at the time.

It's also the, maybe it has to do with how the writer, is the issue a character? Or is it more like, oh, I'm going to talk about this, but I'm going to talk about it in a way that is not.

With Sarah Margo, the issue is a character.

With Doris Lessing, not always.

Okay, Doris Lessing, congratulations on the Nobel.

The list he gave his daughter is intense.

We are talking Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior.

Look at the sheer thematic density happening on that single shelf.

He is not handing his teenage daughter light, breezy, young adult fiction to pass the time on a beach trip.

No.

Then you have Marquez dealing with generational curses, imperialist exploitation, and the bloody history of Latin America.

And then consider the inclusion of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook.

Yeah, talk about that one.

shall we do our motivational quotes

the organization i'm a part of aim for the heart posted this on their instagram it says whatever you're meant to do do it now the conditions are always impossible doris lessing

yes that's a good one mine is forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn't know before you learned it

uh maya angelou how did i have a feeling she's so wise everything in life we're going through blindly so even if we think we've experienced something like it we haven't

That's much easier.

One of the authors in my book, Doris Lessing, who had a beautiful cat called El Magnifico, He sadly developed problems and he needed to have one of his front legs amputated.

And Doris Lessing wrote a wonderful little sort of a long short story called The Old Age of Il Magnifico.

And it's a very moving piece of writing about her disabled cat and how it had to cope with no leg when once there was a second leg at the front.

How does a cat jump up onto a bed or go downstairs when a front leg is missing? It's a really beautiful piece of writing.

Well, Sarah, you think you know someone.

I was fascinated to find several tomes of Russian literature, some French classics by Camus, and a collection of Doris Lessing.

Next to those, a few Jilly Coopers, of course, the Marianne Keys book I'd lent her in 2008, and wait for it, a whole series of Star Trek novels.

I had so many questions and they pretty much took up the rest of the night.