Doris Lessing

I hear that the book is being assigned in history classes and politics classes in schools and universities.

This pleases me, since one of the reasons I wrote the novel was that I felt there are blank spaces where novels ought to be, particularly in nineteenth-century literature.

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

It describes what happened in my political group in the seventies” or “The Golden Notebook describes my life as a woman.”

When it first came out it was considered quite an advanced book, but recently it was given to girls of fifteen in a school in North London and they took it in their stride.

They associated communism and communists with self-seeking and opportunism.

I continue to get letters from men about The Golden Notebook—as many as from women.

They may say that it opened their eyes to the feelings and experiences of women, or that what interests them is the politics, or the “style” of the main American character, who now seems to them quite ridiculously macho.

Or a woman writes to say—and this has happened often—that her boyfriend or husband gave her the book, saying it influenced him.

I re-read the novel the other day and remembered the fury of energy that went into it.