yes..it's a golden notebook

an article on Doris Lessing's 'The Golden Notebook'

Described mostly as a ‘women’s book’, The Golden Notebook (1962) does indeed talk about the confusing and emotionally intense world of a middle-aged writer Anna. Though written long time back, the novel is still a success among avid readers due to its contemporary theme of passion for liberation from male superiority and patronizing, from superstitious ceremonies, etc. It is a full, complex story of a modern woman who tries to live with the freedom of a man.

The central character of the novel is a successful middle aged women writer, living alone with her young daughter. She occasionally rents out a room of her flat not for money but in order to find someone there in the otherwise empty and lonely house. Anna has already written a book about the experiences of a group of communists in colonial Africa that has been a bestseller, but she was not satisfied with her work. She has been abandoned by a lover and suffers from a writer’s block right now.

She keeps four notebooks, out of fear of a breakdown that might take place as a result of the fragmented state of her mind. Step by step, she goes over her experiences, her responses to life, eventually coming to terms with her growing disillusionment, her self-induced sexual betrayal, and her feelings of social and emotional rejection. Each notebook deals with a different experience of her life. The black notebook reviews her African experiences of early years. The red one records her political life, specifically her disillusionment with Communism. The yellow notebook deals with the fictionalized version of her own personal experiences, and the blue notebook is Anna’s personal diary.

Out of her fear that she might go insane due to the fragmented state of her mind, Anna tries to bring the threads of her life in all four books together in a final golden notebook. She kind of first views her life from all different angles as portrayed in the four notebooks, goes over her experiences, looking at her reactions to all of them and eventually manages to unify her identity in the golden notebook. She realizes her disillusionment with communism and the trauma caused by emotional and sexual betrayal and rejection by her lover, tries to understand professional anxieties as well as tensions of family and friends. In a way the novel can be taken as Anna journey to search for her true self. The novel is an excellent amalgam of sex, politics, and emotional breakdown. 

sirajsha