The Golden Notebook

"One woman's struggle to write a notebook that contains all the compartmentalized facets of her life -- her childhood, her politics and her lovers. Unlike the popular books of the 1960s, which featured 'mad housewives' jumping out of windows, what Lessing tried to do was to bring together a woman's brain and a woman's body, to show the delight in physicality. Womanhood is exuberant -- and wonderful."

"At an early point in this novel, Lessing’s heroine, Anna, says that she wishes she could write ‘a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life.’ That’s as good a way as any to describe this book and its effect on me—but it’s also a genuinely involving and surprisingly enjoyable read, especially given that it is by a writer with almost no sense of humor. There was a time when I believed that any modern woman had to read The Golden Notebook, but I’m no longer given to pronouncements that are quite so doctrinaire."