When I first encountered Lessing’s work, as a teen, what I adored most about The Golden Notebook was its highly nuanced depiction of how major movements for change can fail from internal bodies of injustice, due in large part to how colonial racism and class shape the nature, intentions, and outcomes of many of these supposedly radical spheres. May all creators given high honours similarly call attention to the unjust systems that create these plateaus of achievement and possibility in the first place.)

(Hers is my favourite Nobel Prize speech, by the by, because it focusses on what keeps most human beings from being able to contemplate similar platforms and accolades. In some of her non-fiction texts, like the CBC Massey Lecture, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, and her 2007 Nobel Prize speech, “On not winning the Nobel Prize”, Lessing made plain her dissatisfaction with many rhetorical conceits we conflate with genuinely transformative activism, along with the injustice of even many of our strongest movements for change. The Golden Notebook is most commonly known for illustrating how the imposition of gender roles based on sex characteristics impacts artistic, economic, political, and relational outcomes, but I strongly resonate with Lessing’s frustration around the work being pigeonholed as a “feminist classic”, with all the unwitting reduction to simplistic binaries that such a term invites. I can’t remember who recommended Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962) to me as a teen, but I read it during a period when I was glutting myself on mid-20th-century British authors (Iris Murdoch and Margaret Drabble being two other stand-outs Beryl Bainbridge, I’d meet only in my late 20s).

The golden notebook 1962