Word: childhood
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Even at 88, Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing refuses to play the role of Britain's elder literary stateswoman. "As you get older, you don't get wiser," she says. "You get irritable." Her latest book, Alfred and Emily (out in the U.S. on August 5), recounts her childhood on a farm in Southern Rhodesia, and examines the profound effects of World War I on her father, a former soldier and amputee, and her mother, a nurse whose true love drowned in the English Channel. On the eve of the book's publication in the U.K., Lessing spoke with TIME...
...book you say that the First World War squatted over your childhood. How so? My father and my mother, I now see, were very much done in by World War I. My father was always so mingled with rage at his life. He got severe diabetes, and a whole lot of other ills come with that. He became an invalid and passive, which was not his nature at all. It took me a very long time to see that I'd never really known...
Lessing's book, an account of her childhood on the frontlines of her parents' horrific memories, is an unusual work in two parts. The first half, a novella, imagines the lives her parents could have lived in England had the war never occurred; the second half, a memoir, recounts how their lives actually unfolded in their mud-brick farmhouse in Rhodesia. Together, they form a painful meditation on family and war, one in which the distance between dreams and reality is measured with disappointment. Lessing's life, we discover, falls in the chasm between them...
...childhood dream was to grow up to be Vice President. That way, I figured, I'd get to be in history books, but I wouldn't have to do any work. I am the one person who, even after my parents pointed him out on TV, aspired to become Walter Mondale. With voters asking for change, this might be my year. So I called a person who has vetted vice-presidential candidates for past nominees and asked him to vet me. Because of the sensitive nature of his work, he requested that he remain anonymous-and that I not give...
...bones for soup." He also rejects any packaged items. "The key is staying away from all processed foods. Even beans. A bag of dry beans is cheaper than a can of beans." Because Colicchio volunteers with Share Our Strength, a charity that fights childhood hunger, he knows how hard it is for families to get by on a low food budget. "You can do this, but it's tough," he says. "Look how much time we're spending. If you're a working mom, you don't have time to look around like this. And you have to know...