false 24100 006093140X 9780060931407 1714 295 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167520135m/24100.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24100.The_Golden_Notebook 7728 Doris Lessing 8324 1278 0 2009-01-12T08:08:07-08:00 259121 573 2009-01-12T08:08:07-08:00 0 2009-01-08T09:36:40-08:00 246001 508 2009-01-08T09:36:40-08:00 4 0 false Sat Dec 27 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Mon Oct 27 12:43:29 -0700 2008 Fri Jan 16 13:10:25 -0800 2009
Anna is a mother, ex-Communist, writer and "free woman" who lives off the royalties of the one very successful book she has published while conducting affairs with a series of weak, selfish and unfulfilling men. When we meet her, she is in the midst of keeping four notebooks. In the red one, she records her political life and her ups and downs with the British Communist party; the yellow one contains a novel inspired by her most heart breaking love affair; the black one is about her early experiences in Africa with a group of comrades; and the blue one is a personal diary that is filled with newspaper clippings and records of Anna's meetings with a psychiatrist. At the end of the book, on the verge of losing her whole self to madness, Anna realizes that she has to find a way to bring all the threads of her life into one story, to be written in a golden notebook, before it's too late.

Are you still with me? Good. I know this sounds a little confusing and hard to follow, but trust me - the story flows so naturally from narrative to narrative, that the reader hardly notices the different threads. Each notebook brings a deeper understanding to who Anna is, what she struggles with, and this understanding makes the reader feel a startling level of empathy with her.

Anna Wulf is a free woman, but only so far as she is willing to defy the traditional roles that society has assigned to women. She is not married, but some part of her longs for the sense of safety that marriage brings. She is a single mother, which requires a certain amount of order and routine, and she is a writer, which demands selfishness and solitude. Anna must split herself in multiple selves, multiple notebooks and narratives, in order to survive, and yet it's the splitting that slowly drives her mad. Whether Anna can find a way to be her true, full self, all at once, is the crux of The Golden Notebook. This struggle spoke to women in the 60's, when it was written, and it's a struggle that remains relevant to women today.

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