Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook

Since we launched the project this week, it’s been a thrill to see comments appear in the margins.  So far, some of my favorite moments have been:

Page 5: Harriet Rubin points out that President Elect Obama singles out The Golden Notebook as one of his favorite books.  She reflects: “When I first read The Golden Notebook in 1974, it struck me as a book about how to live powerfully as an artist, and I went looking in the shops for a golden notebook of my own. I’m still looking for it. Can we find in this novel something about what public poetry requires, what it is to speak with a voice that calls rather than commands or demands?”

Page 15: “Anna meets her friend Molly in the summer of 1957 after a separation…”  The readers begin the “Free Women” section and consider what a “free” woman really means in Lessing’s text.

Page 38: Nona Willis Aronowitz and Naomi Alderman look at the character of Richard, and on the following page, Laura Kipnis weighs in, questioning Molly and Anna’s “posture of moral superiority.”

Page 52: Readers discuss Lessing’s critique of women’s loyalties, if women really do establish warmth and intimacy with each other by pontificating about men, and Alison Bechdel.

Page 64: Laura Kipnis writes: “Lessing returns here to the theme of form vs. formlessness that she talked about in the preface; and the relations between psychoanalysis, art, unconsciousness and creativity. I find this just so interesting, and close to my own experience of writing…”

We’d like to encourage everyone to take part in the discussion.  If a reader says something that you find interesting, want to expand on, or even disagree with, you can jump over to the forum and have your say. In a recent forum post, kittent pointed out a wonderful passage from Lessing’s introduction that we had missed: ‘“Art during the Middle Ages was communal, unindividual; it came out of a group consciousness. It was without the driving painful individuality of the art of the bourgeois era. And one day we will leave behind the driving egotism of individual art. We will return to an art which will express not man’s self-divisions and separateness from his fellows but his responsibility for his fellows and his brotherhood.”

But, these are just pieces that I found engaging — what have you liked reading?

-Kathleen, if:book