Lessing's Golden Notebook On this day in 1962, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook was published. It is the most highly-praised and still the best-selling of her two dozen books. Lessing has described it as an attempt "to break certain forms of consciousness and go beyond them"; she has also said that the novel became "an albatross" hung around her neck by a feminist misreading.
BBC Interviews An interview in which the author discusses what it takes to be a writer, her feelings that The Golden Notebook is not necessarily a "womans' book," a comparison of imaginative storytelling, parables and fables with realism, how she would like readers to interpret her novels and recognize their importance as "aides to living."
"I think it was Virginia Woolf who said that practically nobody read novels the way a writer would like them to be read. ... I think you learn more about something if you're detached, and not identifying. You see what people do is to identify with characters, and I don't think that's a way of learning very much about yourself or the character."
