#Boston readwrite skin#

Photograph: Reg Innell/Toronto Public Library ‘She helped change the way women are perceived, and perceive themselves’ – by Guardian Review editor Lisa Allardice.Doris Lessing in her own words on the Guardian books podcast.My hero: Doris Lessing by Margaret Drabble – “Doris would invite herself to lunch with me in Hampstead, when the mood took her.“I was the cuckoo in the nest” – Writer Jenny Diski tells the story of how she lived with Lessing as a teenager.Start with: The Golden Notebook – “Hailed as one of the key texts of the women’s movement of the 1960s, this study of a divorced single mother’s search for personal and political identity remains a defiant, ambitious tour de force,” wrote Robert McCrum. In our obfuscating times, we continue to need that eye. Her understanding of resilience and transformation in the midst of upheaval is profound. The two landmarks, for me, are Shikasta, her monumental portrait of humanity, and The Four-Gated City (part of the Children of Violence series), Lessing’s visionary mapping of London and the no-man’s-land between psychosis and sanity – this book opened doors for me.

This was writing from the frontiers of experience and utterly mind-stretching.

#Boston readwrite skin#

Class, sex, old age, childhood, the inner workings of politics, the wilder shores of the psyche – she embraced complexity and got under the skin of the human condition with piercing acuity. As I read my way into the books of this fellow exile, her range and depth emerged – from psychological portraits in granular detail, to vast explorations of cataclysm and survival. Reading Lessing’s subtly brilliant short story Out of the Fountain, I had that Keatsian feeling of a new world coming into view. In my twenties, I was a foreigner in London. Photograph: Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images Doris Lessing working at a typewriter, circa 1950.