Word: lessinger
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"The book emerged on my inner agenda without my planning it," says Lessing, sitting in the ramshackle North London home where she has lived for 25 years. In a career spanning six decades she has churned out nearly 50 books on an old-fashioned typewriter. But at 88, she insists...
Frail and weary she may be, but Lessing still writes with the deftness and nuance that characterized her 1962 novel The Golden Notebook, one of the past century's most influential feminist works. In the memoir, she describes her father being lowered into a mine shaft, "his wooden leg sticking...
That sympathetic portrayal, which deletes Emily from his life, gives way to an unflattering portrait of her mother, whose "rough, unkind" hands Lessing loathed as a child. When the family arrived on the Rhodesian farm as part of a scheme to resettle white servicemen in the British colony, Emily anticipated...
Did the resentment dissipate? "No," Lessing says. "I can't remember a time I wasn't fighting her." In the book, she recounts their epic battles, including one triggered by a letter her mother wrote accusing her of being a prostitute. On another occasion, her mother phoned Lessing's employer...
Yet in parts of the book, Lessing softens and reveals her mother's capacity to care. As a former nurse, she brought ointments, stethoscopes and other implements to the village, turning their farmhouse into a makeshift hospital for local people.