Word: motherly
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...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's William Lee Adams at her home in London...
...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...
...Those Left Behind A week after the daring July 2 operation that freed former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and 14 others, some have expressed concern that the high-profile rescue did nothing to aid the nearly 700 others still held by Colombia's FARC rebels; one captive's mother referred to Betancourt as a "trophy hostage." Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, whose revolution inspired the group's creation in the 1960s, called for an unconditional release of all FARC captives, while stopping short of asking the group to surrender. Meanwhile, two rebels detained in the rescue face extradition...
...chum, How did you acquire such an expansive vocabulary? -Joseph Gerard O'Brien, Newark, DelawareTeaching! It really is from teaching. And also I grew up in a household where my mother was constantly correcting my grammar, and still does. And I love, love, love, love the written word. I'll re-read books, I'll reread passages from books over and over and over, because I just love the way words look on the page. And I have to say as a teacher, I always wanted to raise the bar for my students. I wanted them to wonder and then...
With Lessing entering the twilight of her life, it's hard not to read Alfred and Emily as an act of atonement. Drawing on decades of hindsight, she accepts that her mother's war wounds, though less visible, ran as deep as her father's - and she endeavors to heal them. In the novella, she envisions her mother as what she could have been, a teacher and philanthropist, not the "demented" woman that war had made her. The memoir honors that potential, too. "The real Emily McVeagh was an educator, who told stories and brought me books," Lessing writes...