I avoided trying to read this book for years. You may be horrified to discover that I find much of the literature by people who have won awards to be stifling. I read to learn and I read to escape. I despise pomposity.

This book is not pompous. This books is not arrogant. From the first paragraph, I was hooked. The only way I can describe it is: a womanly book for people who don't much care for chick-lit. I don't see films marketed to women and I don't read books that do the same. This book feels more like a 1960s British indie film. I watched as I read, captivated.

The dialogue is snappy and the characters are damaged, but very interesting. The whole time I kept thinking, "Wow, I see how this changed everything. I get the hype." Indeed, for perhaps the third time, I understand and appreciate the hype.

Pick up this book, now.

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All the Amazing Notes, March 27, 2001
Reviewer: Eric Anderson (London, United Kingdom)

The Golden Notebook is Lessing's most well known of her works and with good reason. It is an incredibly complex and layered work that addresses such ideas as authorship of one's life, the political climate of the 60s and the power relation between the sexes. It would be naïve to consider this novel as just a feminist polemic. I know many people have read it only this way or not read it because they assume it is only this. Lessing articulates this point well in her introduction. The novel inhabits many worlds of thought. It just so happens that at the time of its publication it was a very poignant work for feminism. More than any book I know it has the deepest and longest meditation on what it means to split your identity into categories because you can not conceive of yourself as whole in the present climate of society and in viewing your own interactions with people. This obsession with constructing a comprehensive sense of identity leads to an infinite fictionalisation of the protagonist's life. Consider the following passage "I looked at her, and thought: That's my child, my flesh and blood. But I couldn't feel it. She said again: `Play, mummy.' I moved wooden bricks for a house, but like a machine. Making myself perform every movement. I could see myself sitting on the floor, the picture of a `young mother playing with her little girl.' Like a film shot, or a photograph." She can't attach her own vision of herself to the reality of her life. The two are separated by the ideologies of society which influence her own vision of who she should be.

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