Doris Lessing

The Golden Notebook

 

Anna Wulf writes in four different-colored notebooks. One is a journal (blue), another is a novel based on her life (yellow), a third recounts her experience in the communist party (red), and a fourth details her time in Southern Rhodesia during World War II (black). The novel examines the contradictions of 1960s womanhood, which, today, in many ways seem archaic but in other ways remain tragically apt. It is not until Anna emerges from a mental breakdown, reconciling fact with fiction, reality with fantasy, that she integrates the fractured elements of her life, writing  in a golden notebook.