Do young people still read Doris Lessing? When I was a youth, The Golden Notebook was, after a generation or more as part of the underground canon — those books that are passed hand-to-hand with a friend’s reverent assurances that This will totally blow your mind — beginning to pass into the academic curriculum. And once those books land on the syllabus, they are often never read again. Not really read, anyway. Oh, the undergraduates still struggle through them out of a sense of duty, but they’re not found and absorbed as they once were. Certainly, at the time, The Golden Notebook was still much talked-about both as a vital text of second-wave feminism and as a great novel in its own right; Lessing uses the semi-autobiographical figure of Anna Wulf to express, in a distinctly female voice, nothing less than the discontents of the modern human condition.

When I finally got around to reading The Golden Notebook, I was taken with its craft, its control, its insight. Most of all, Lessing impresses with her ruthlessness. The book is unsparing in how it dissects the ways in which we damage each other while trying to create a finer world — how readily we will betray and sacrifice one another when a sufficiently lofty goal is dangled under our noses. It’s a novel of enormous power, even today; but if The Golden Notebook was not a blinding revelation to me in the way it examines the pitfalls and possibilities of love and art, and the traps of economics and activism, I cannot entirely chalk it up to the forty years of transformed social and sexual landscape separating me as a reader from Doris Lessing as a writer.

No, mostly I think it’s because, by the time I read The Golden Notebook, I had already heard and absorbed Kirsty MacColl’s album Kite.
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