The Golden Notebook

Anna Wulf, a writer and former Communist, keeps four separate notebooks to contain the different parts of her life, until she tries to bring them together in one.

Why Start Here

The Golden Notebook is one of the most structurally inventive novels of the twentieth century and one of its most honest about what it actually means to be a thinking, political, creative woman. Anna’s four notebooks, black for Africa and writing, red for politics, yellow for fiction, blue for personal life, are not a gimmick. They are Lessing’s argument that a person’s life cannot be unified into a single coherent narrative, and that the attempt to do so is its own kind of breakdown.

The novel was immediately claimed as a feminist text, which Lessing always resisted, not because it isn’t that, but because it is so much more. It is also about Communism’s disintegration as a political dream, about writer’s block, about mental fragmentation, about the relationships between women. It remains shocking in its candour.

What to Expect

Long and structurally complex. The novel-within-a-novel structure takes some orientation. But Lessing is never dull, every section is alive with ideas and feeling. This is a book that changes how you see things, which is the highest thing a novel can do.